In the field with the god

Laura Donnelly

What will you do,
when it is your turn in the field with the god?

-Louise Glück

My mother stretched a phone cord through
the field where I was born, a coil

of potential energy to whip us back.
I study for the test of frenulum and capillary,

soft spot on a crown, ragdoll neck.
My hands are large, uncertain starfish.

In the field where I was born, small animals
hid in pine tree furrows. We left empty milk jugs

studded with pushpins for traps.
The weatherman colors the typhoon red as

a bloody heart pounding the coast. 
I dream your organs outside of the body –

hands slippery over the fluttering
lungs, twin kidney beans ripe and exposed.

Laura Donnelly’s first full-length book of poems, Watershed, won the 2013 Cider Press Review Editors Prize. She is also the author of a chapbook, Nocturne – Schumann’s Letters (Finishing Line Press, 2010). An assistant professor of creative writing at SUNY Oswego, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Rhino, Diagram, Typo, Pank, Cimarron Review, Flyway, Third Coast, and others.