Talk dirt to me. Tell how bluestem roots

near thirty feet. How echinacea saves the bees.

I ogle dandelions. Have I told you the things

they can do to a body?  Will you truss my

grain mill to my bike? Solar our home & I’ll

be hot to the touch. Just burning up.

Solve the riddle of the polar ice & I’ll spread

like a starfish, though the starfish

are dying in droves. They’re tearing

their arms off. Did you hear? I’ve no mind

for sonnets, no mind for making another

child when even the Mississippi

is gobbling its own plain. I don’t know

what my safe word is. The closest I can get

is native.   Maybe river.   Maybe rain.

*

Aubrey Ryan’s work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in Ant-, Best New Poets, El Aleph, Phantom Limb, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. Her poems have received awards from The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Consequence Magazine, Booth Journal, and Tupelo Press, and have been nominated for three Pushcart prizes. Aubrey is the Writer in Residence at the Midwest Writing Center in Iowa where she lives with her husband and small son.