We make our bed by the river, thick
with lupine, silt-tongued and wanting
each other’s slick heat despite the fever
running through your currents,
your fresh scars lit up from within.
One afternoon in the downy sunlight
we rescue a duckling tumbling through
the red water, rudderless as a clam.
We bed it in a box of Trivial Pursuit
softened by washcloths atop the heating
pad you’ve been using on your twisted
insides, now cystless and raw as silk—
then bicker and careen through deer-
fraught woods into Duluth, deliver it
to a doorstep where they promise
rehabilitation, a reverse storking.
Back in the cabin’s gaslamp glow,
embers mow the kindling that burns
faster than we can feed it. I feed you
fatty steak and roasted fingerlings
and after, we release steam, seethe
and press into each other’s wet heft
in the twin bed, just the pines outside
and the cloud-covered sickness of night.
Did you feel it then, too? A premonition
of ashes, burnt to the field’s mound?
NORTHERN LANDSCAPE
Caroline Stevens is a Chicago-based poet originally from Minneapolis. She holds an MFA from Vanderbilt University, where she won the 2022 & 2023 Academy of American Poets University Prize and served as the Editor in Chief of Nashville Review. Her work can be found in Parentheses Journal, Buffalo Journal, and elsewhere.