Jessie, and: As Autumn

Jessie

Touch the electric fence, she commands, Swallow frogspit. Crawl under the bull’s belly. Round up the captives.

I collect them—Dottie, Chuck, Pauline, my brother— and lead them blindfold through our woods to the abandoned storage shed, guide them up rotted-out stairs to the airless attic littered with mildewed magazines, loud with somnolent bees.

She teeters on a stack of crates, nearly naked torso stained with iodine, buzzard feathers stuck in a bandanna around her head. The captives kneel. I pass a cup of purplish liquid. Lion’s blood for courage, she thunders, tossing me a wink. Eyes of fallen sky, warrior cheekbones. Never again a wink compelling as hers.

Our last day, we swam across the reservoir and sprawled on the bank. Scooping dirt to pack on mosquito bites, she found a forked stick and thrust it at me, jeering: this is what men look like down there poking it sharply between circled thumb and forefinger this is what they do to you. “You’re lying!” I cried. You just wait!

The next day, she didn’t come out, but I stole into her house and found her curled on the bed, her legs bloodied by her mother’s belt. Then she disappeared. Abandoned, I hardened against her, but after a while, I began to see her everywhere, running in the far pasture or disappearing down a school corridor, looking over her shoulder for me.

As Autumn

approaches with its burnish and tarnish,

we watch the crows at light-fall, hundreds, maybe thousands

flocking to a communal roost, the air full of alarms, near

collisions, noisy settlings and resettlings.

Tree limbs tremble. This could be an army in tight

formation or a massing of refugees, preservation or the edge of famine,

when, on every branch of every tree, darkness descends, and silence.