Quinn Lewis
Small Animal Bones
I asked my queendom for something real. The quarry gave
its answer: ghosts, sifted like unseen flour
from bluestone. Made the dog whimper and hurry
down our summer hill. I asked for arrivals: the ones
I wanted. And the stream bestowed the sound
of its rushing like tires on the road. I knew
what it really was. And I didn’t know. Asked
not to be alone with my fire, and the porch sent
a corn snake to bathe in the sun. I begged
to be seen in my dailyness. Swept, brewed the coffee,
sang, rinsed the eggshells, carted pretty moths
up from the basement, brushed and brushed
until I learned well the grain of the horse’s new
winter fur. And when the work was done, the house
offered mice to bear witness. They skittered across
my pillowcase. I bore the soft needles of their feet.
Began to think the needle soft. Then the house asked
for ruthlessness. I set the traps. The smell of sour
cabbage filled the rooms. It was harder than I thought
to kill. I always bragged I’d rather hunt
than starve, that I’d keep what I loved alive.
But when fall came, I broke like the little bones I was,
as inconsequential as acorns underfoot, and that quiet.
Quinn Lewis’s poems appear in The Southern Review, Green Mountains Review, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. She’s received a Claudia Emerson Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and residencies from Hawthornden Castle and Willapa Bay AiR. She lives of a farm and takes care of a horse in northeast Pennsylvania.