Aroace Girl, Leveed

You stand over me, water
running from your antlers and breasts.

I offer you my belly, the prairie rattler
coiled in my uterus, dropseed

blue grama and little bluestem locked 
tight in its mouth against extinction.

You cloud a morning out of this place
born smooth as any grave.

It’s okay to weep in front of people—I tell myself 
even the rock you gave me from the Colorado

for my birthday was granite opened and hammered
with clavicle, limestone, truckbed 

and gutshot. Once I rocked shut to any soft word.
A crib by the side of the highway

of ribs slatted to wind. All my life
I’ve been running from that treeless cold,

yoked to plains and a winter woman’s
refusal to cry, to fold into threaded scrap

of tire shrapnel. I sucked a dead quail’s feathers in my mouth.
What I shed, I shed gladly. Touch my shoulders

and I’ll release all my grief at once
the way slabs of ice migrate

under chords of stars over roads
after prairie floods. You lean over me

and weep, afraid of what
we are. I tell you we are those animals

driven desperate by hunger to cross
a river too full to contain all this sky.