Anna, Whose Last Name Is Covered In Lichens, 1851-1920, poem by Matt Prater

And I was there as well, I saw. My hands, too,

went out and made the world. I did not

only imagine the soldiers, I touched them.

I soothed, with cool rags, the dying Johnny soldier;

I soothed, with cool rags, the dying Michiganite;

I caressed their tender knobbed muscles, tender paunch;

soldered, with iron set to the banked blaze, more iron;

slammed the errant wagon wheel in place;

hammered in the things for hammering;

wiped the drooling face of the orphaned cow

whose mother was stolen by Lincolnites;

and dreamed to caress the tender muscle

of one Lincolnite who robbed as Robin Hood,

who spied me one whole week from a distant ridge

as I went through my nurse and farm girl chores,

and when he had stolen our second stolen cow

left me my allotted pitcher of blue cream. Know:

I, too, would have tendered my body on the field,

though I was tender, tender as any boy who could not say it–

who I would’ve killed, or as easily’ve doused,

at the first request, with my amorous wet.

Matt Prater is a poet and writer from Saltville, VA. Winner of both the George Scarbrough Prize for Poetry and the James Still Prize for Short Story, his work has appeared in a number of journals, including Appalachian Heritage, The Honest Ulsterman, The Moth, and Still. He is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at Virginia Tech.