Midwinter, Maryland woods are wet
and stuck to the earth— taproots.
His hair a buzz of rust and her calluses
hand-pocketed in the wears of overalls,
Her own thick friz syrupy, curled
around her scalp.
The ground a clump
Of oak trunks, knotted,
full of pebbles,
The smell of crabs
He cuts in-two with his knife,
angled from palm, shell-
Crack to reveal
flesh, sweet, salt.
The air misty, thick as smoke, above checkered
sheet they eat from, basket of fruit she brought,
Beer he sips. Dusk-fed, they groan
into each other. She is so young.
He breeds bees and opens her hand,
dry, places claw and crab belly,
Flush of saltwater,
plate of root vegetables.
They eat with hands first.
Mouths hang open.
*
In the meadows, we friends at first
used to eat the red berries,
The wrong ones— water roots—
golden apples and milk bottled
Up on fleece blankets our babysitters
laid for us. We’d run our hands through pockets
Of clovers, beards of dirt;
in her backyard we buried
Chicken bones and our baby teeth and overtop
grew her mother’s mint.
The spinach, cilantro:
Earth meat, foaming at the mouth
of the mud.
At the ocean
We looked for seaweed and held
our breath, ribbons of kelp,
Salmon, mushrooms barnacled
to the sides of shore piers, fog
We tried to grasp—
Sea daisies, mermaid tails, octopus plums
foraged from underwater orchards,
We swore
*
He licked the goosebumps, back
of my neck, they rose like
Blush, dozen buds,
light pink.
I had my first boyfriend at six
or seven, and we kept it from my parents
Like we had anything of our own to keep.
Our roots fibrous,
souls still hardened in our ankle-bones,
We danced on sand dunes and hung
in parallel crescent moons on mud
Beneath the trampoline. Butterfly kisses, secret
life of brushed limbs, arm fuzz uprooted to tremble
On freckles, warm jolt, hugs we thought
forbidden, his breath. I still remember
His smell: linen, skin, sweet-damp,
palm trunks, like mornings made
Of egg yolks and honeybread,
fresh rain on the oaks that curtained our tree-fort.
*
The poems are Wright, earthy, eros,
full of rural, plant sex, roots tuberous,
Appalachia, home that was not home. Shadows murk
in corners and later leak, soak open
Meadows, seep to prisons, stumble over
old abandoned houses, once belonging both
To coven and prayer belt.
Her husband.
Spine too wide to index
against thumb, smelling like
Charlottesville, my father’s Arkansas.
They remind me of a lesbian.
As for myself? C.D. herself is the color green,
riper than Forrest.
Katie Hogan is a twenty-year-old poet from Richmond, Virginia, living and writing in Denver, Colorado, where she's pursuing an undergraduate degree in creative writing. Her work appears and is forthcoming in Déraciné Magazine, Isacoustic, Certain Circuits, and The Chiron Review, among others, and she currently serves as a poetry intern for Denver Quarterly and the poetry editor for Mineral Lit Mag.
