Caroline Crew

Pastoral

This is an excerpt of what my eyes have seen:
swamp as a woman, desert as a woman, the mountain
erosion castrated to soft billows, river as a woman,
the unforgiving machine, the machine, home.

I strike a fat lash as good as the next well-blonded
flutter against a row of houses standing simple.

To a house nothing is truly enveloped and so
we have the domestic sphere, its primary quality
being permeability, only the sound that it is breaking.

Pastoral as Plough

a little blood sweetens the worst of rocks
piled against your cave o harder mouth

more beautiful in being static
every continent the most perfect curve

you think you want everything faster
more now here now this and her now

how long a crystal takes to will itself
that the crush is what makes it

conduit of centuries screaming
too slow to be heard

so you lay on her cold body
and that is what makes it

this is what makes the flint spark
how fire lies in the dirt

handed down to men in a story
made by men what burns

any more I have given you my ashes
a wasted softness I made myself

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Caroline Crew is the author of several chapbooks, and her full-length collection, PINK MUSEUM, will be out from Big Lucks in 2015. Her work appears in Conjunctions, Salt Hill Journal, and Black Warrior Review, among others. She’s online here: caroline-crew.com.