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We just moved in.
Cows and goats as neighbors.
Mangy dog hunting varmnits.
Old hardwood floors.
A backporch for houseplants, smoke breaks, muddy boots.
Our white shanty farmhouse.
Windows abound; sparrows nests on the ledges.
The steady clack and rumble of trains.
A room to be my Study.
The sky flickers like an off-channel TV screen, the black and white fuzzy flashing. Sunflower cover the horizon, their shadows playing with me in the dark, casting lies against the side of the barn. I swear I can see the outline of a man, hunkered below their heavy drooping heads. A gust of wind makes them bend and shake, playing tricks on my eyes again and again. Am I still alone here in this barn? I become nervous, pulling my Winchester pocket knife out, opening it up, and squeezing it in my left hand while I write. It was all so strange, sitting on the lowest bales of hay, watching the heat lightening on the East side of the barn. The chickens are much bigger now than the stout fuzzy bodies they had a month ago. They softly fluff their feathers and cluck under their breath, the straw beneath them rustling as they stir their feet. The rain on the barn roof came down in a light mist, until finally, the skies opened up and large dense drops fell and splashed to the wheat fields and barn below. The wind blew in through the broken windows and whistled through my ears, tossing about my paper and all the tufts of hay that stuck out awkwardly and messy from their bales; frail bodies shaking.
It is nearly noon here now, and we’ve already been up for awhile. Breakfast was fried eggs, freckled and warm from the coop, covered with salt and pepper, and crispy greasy bacon to dip in the bright orange yolks.
We spent fifteen minutes in hot pursuit-meaning he ran around the barn, appearing and disappearing, while I gave chase and tried to shoot him with a bow and arrows.
I am at ease here; the fridge is full of milk, the yard of wood for the bonfire tonight, and my head with thoughts of petroglyphs and praying mantis, and the sex we had on our knees on the wooden floor of the kitchen earlier.
The majority of today I’ve seen behind the lens of my camera; shiny blue glass electric line bulbs. Yellow argiope garden spiders with abdomens the size of grapes. A feisty horse. A teething puppy. A hayloft whose drying onions were illuminated by sunlight through windows.
My mouth tastes like hot coffee and cold mint tea. Hand-rolled cigarettes and semen. Fried eggs and the beer I gargled with when I woke up this morning.
The glass beads, strung up on the back porch, rattled and clicked as the wind picked up; the trees, swaying south in the breeze.
Our refrigerator sounds like a bullfrog.
His fur shined like a prism against the sunlight; every hair a rainbow of color.
Where is my cat? He should be able to smell me. These Kansas winds constantly blow, taking my scent to his little wet nose, sniffing the ground in a distant cornfield.
The cellar door is open and a fan is on and blowing somewhere below. The kitchen window is propped open by another fan and the cicada songs penetrate loudly inside the room. The counters are littered with mason jars and coffee mugs. Tomatoes fresh from the garden, and various pots and pans. The oven clock tells me it’s 12:19pm but it feels much earlier than that. We are going to keep working on opening up the cellar from the outside, and do some more digging. An activity that has thoughts of wet dark soil, and toads, and caves, and a wheelbarrow in my head.
The sky splashed over the treetops and gathered in pools at my feet.
Their teeth clicked like bone and steel.
My eyes are brown, reflecting like thermal pools in the sun. My hair, from my body catching up in years, will be white as the snow falling outside my window.
My fingers are numb; covered in cuts and scrapes, raw from working in the garden day in and day out.
The nights here are different. The stars and the prairie grasses brush cheeks. The foxtails and shooting stars dancing and flirting, swaying and twisting together. The only things existing in our world are those illuminated by our headlights, and the rest is black, and part of the sky surrounding us.
It’s harvest time here. Every field is full of giant metal machines, cutting and sorting and munching up and down the rows until the sun is nearly set. Sometimes, the fields at night are full of headlights and the roar of engines.
The streetlights in town hang like black cocoons from their metal posts.
The barn lights dot the horizon for miles, being mistaken for bright stars in constellations.
Standing on the back porch, I see the first snow of the year. The barn roof has become soft and white. The junipers dark green salted with snowflakes. It falls slow but steady, a pattern of frozen water whose patterns are never the same. My blonde hair is frozen with diamonds. The smoothness of the coated yard is broken up by four sets of dog prints, and tire tracks from the truck.
Bees have been following me all day as I wander around in the sunlight.
I collected rocks from the road as we walked. Stopping constantly to stoop and pick up the pink, yellow, white pebbles. By the time we got home, my pockets were plenty weighed down with them. I pulled them all out; the flat circular grey stones stacked like poker chips in my hand, and deposited them next to the soft small ones that looked like a pile of jelly beans on the table. Now, they all sit in a glass jar, waiting for you to come home.
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