Windblown, by Kat Lewis

Christina's World, by Andrew Wyeth (USA). 1948.

Windblown

There is a woman in a browning field of summer
wheat and somewhere a radio is playing
her favourite song to a window shutting for the evening.

She is in a pink shirtdress with black dirt
beneath her fingernails. Her hands
are rough, the kind from time spent running
them against every shade of wood grain. The kind of rough
of humming in your sleep with nobody in bed
beside you to hear.

Maybe she is hypnotized by the high noon light
or maybe she is suffocating in the whitecaps of gold.
Or maybe she just wants to be left alone,
and I’m not sure it makes any difference.

The stickers in her hose turn her pale
ankle skin into plowed acreage. Her body
a scarecrow. An exhibit.

Her dark hairs rattlesnake through the wind until
the farm is a dollhouse under a magnifying glass
sky. She accordioned to the ground
at some point, idyllically,
with a haystack at her back,
as if this were a painting, as if this were
something any of us have a name for. 

Kat Lewis

Kat Lewis is a candidate in poetry at the University of Idaho where she has served as managing editor and reader for Fugue Literary Journal. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Meadow, High Desert Journal, The Superstition Review, Santa Clara Review, and elsewhere. She lives and teaches in Moscow, Idaho.