Alva Imagines Heartbreak as an Animal
It steps hard in the mud. Its belly full
of the crop you’d saved from septennial
plagues, dousing the precious seeds
you’d seen to adolescence or middle-age
essence and brought back from the brink
with walls of petrochemicals—various
pesticides, medicines, fertilizers scribed on the label
—or that you saved with a swinging broom, or
your prayers, or your sweat, or your sometimes
luck holding when the cloud of disaster dove close.
When the storms were over, it drank long
from the pools at your feet, let you stroke
its soft ear, its drenched fur a mirror, a painting,
an Impressionist’s accident of light. It nuzzled
your hand. It lumbered through the collapsing
fence you’d always meant to mend.
L. S. McKee‘s poems have appeared in Best New Poets, The Georgia Review, Crazyhorse, Copper Nickel, Michigan Quarterly Review, Narrative, Oversound, B O D Y, and elsewhere. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford and currently lives in Cambridge, MA, where she teaches writing across STEM disciplines at MIT. Read more about her work here: www.lsmckee.com.