Two Prose Poems After Toyen, by Camille LeFevre

At the Green Table, by Toyen (Czechia) 1945

​Hen House 
 
He has gone, the rooster perched on the centre console of his pickup truck. The hen house sighs. She signals her relief by undressing. Hangs the stiff flag of femininity out the high window of her throat, its genderless shadow greening the rough stone wall of the tower. A coop now, a pink shell, but for roosts, tossed to land upright in zig-zag across false felt. Cue excitement: Some game is about to begin. A bloody ball rolls outside two slick ones, whiter, rounder, harder than eggs. Laid not by golden hens, bobbing, in pairs, beak to beak; but disgorged by the gray sack he left behind. Chicks hatch in twosomes, liminal in the green bluing to black sky. Objects are out of proportion. Feelings flare. 

Sad Day, by Toyen (Czechia) 1942

​Mushroom Hunters

Across the prairie, heath, any arid wilderness, we are faceless now. All semblances of the real cracked, peeling, revealing the bald agony of grief. We were mushroom hunters, stems sturdy and dirt-clung, fissured black caps dressed with earth. Our buckets, trash bags, pockets overflowed with morels, to butter-braise for dressing eggs, steak, salad. Metaphor, too, for your riven brain, gaps widening where the webbing no longer held. Remember we, a twosome. Father-daughter, bulb-clove, mushroom-spawn. We floated through landscapes beloved, tending toward one another. My hands are yours now, spotted, wrinkled. My wrists ragged, root-torn to desert, burying my head in white peony petals; the bushes under which we’d find our fungal delight. 

Camille LeFevre

Camille LeFevre crafts poetry and creative nonfiction, and teaches writing workshops on art and place, from her home on the unceded lands of the Hisatsinom, Yavapai, and Apache in Northern Arizona. Her essay, “Body Topography,” published in The Dodge, was selected for the 2026 Best of the Net Anthology. Her first poetry collection, Sandstone and Kin, will be published in Fall 2026. Her work also appears in Poets for Science, wildscape.literary, Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, Metphrastics, Fugue, Unleash Literary, Electric Lit, Brevity Blog, and other publications. She’s thrilled to have her work, once again, in The Ekphrastic Review.