The heat ate up the grass,
turned it yellow at the roots.
If you need me to get precise
I’ll get precise.
Already, my headache
is the worst part of today.
I dreamed a dream
of us outside a silo.
Or inside a landscape.
I can’t be sure
if the heat ate the corn
the dust turned to wind.
I don’t care
about the silo,
the terribly burned grass.
But you deserve to know
that when you opened your hand
you had seeds there.
You had a cardinal
in your other hand
or you were bleeding.
The way I bleed in dreams
is birds flutter
out and out of my body.
How you bleed in my dreams
is that a horrible shine
stretches over you
like a broken windshield.
My cardinal ate
whatever it was
out of your other hand
its beak breaking
the seeds in loud procession.
If we have many souls,
we must feed each one separately,
you know?
I’m sure enough of that,
but why would I not tell you?
Sometimes when we talk
on the phone, I think to myself
that all words are a form of animal.
I feel so stupid saying this
over and over beside the silo.
I feel so stupid
saying you’ll forgive me soon
the birds leaving my mouth
over and over like a prayer.

*

Kyle McCord is the author of three books of poetry including Sympathy from the Devil (Gold Wake Press 2013).  He has work featured in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, Third Coast and elsewhere.  He’s received grants or awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Baltic Writing Residency.  Along with Wendy Xu, he co-edits iO: A Journal of New American Poetry, and he is lead content editor for LitBridge.  He teaches at the University of North Texas in Denton, TX.