The Sheep Farmer Transmutes
- The Sheep Farmer Transmutes
Rachel Rinehart, poetry
The night he peels a buzzard off the grain truck, wing askance, possum offal still streaking its craw, his wife leaves him.
He bandages the buzzard with her dress, invites it to drape its oily wing over the great wide bed.
He dreams of making love to his wife, of feathers where her legs converge, and the hiss as his voice box leaves him.
For weeks the buzzard heals, fat with egg, scratches out a nest in the bath. He dreams there has been a mistake.
He cannot cry out for his wife, cannot name her. The eggs crack in his likeness. Crouching off the toilet, he vomits into their mouths.
Come spring, buzzard chicks follow the sway-backed ewes perch on their rumps, grow larger, wait for the lambing to begin. [End Page 461]
rachel rinehart’s poems have been published in Quarterly West, Third Coast, Harpur Palate, Folio, and Puerto del Sol and are forthcoming in Indiana Review. She received an AWP Intro Journals Award in Poetry in 2014.
