Soil, poem by Joshua Michael Stewart

She needs to get rid of the revolver

wrapped in the blood-splattered dress

tucked underneath her driver’s seat.

She parks the Chevy on the shoulder

of a gravel road, the engine ticks

in the morning blaze while cicadas

drone their prayers. Jeremiah sings

along with the radio. She steps out

of the car with the swaddled gun

and a wrench snug against her chest,

hops a drainage ditch, and climbs

a barbed wire fence, careful not to snag

her skirt. There’re horses further in the field.

A stallion raises his head, twitches

an ear, and then lowers his breath

back into the dew-drenched grass.

She hollers back to her brother: Jeremiah,

you stay. I won’t be long. He waves her off

with a fat hand through the rolled-down

window, annoyed that she’s interrupting

his song. There’s a rhythmic swish

as she clumps deeper into the pasture.

Grass blades stick to her wet shoes, burs

cling to her cotton hem. She kneels down

behind a bosk, and thinks about the man

alone in the church pew, the way doom

stretched across his face like a prairie fire

leaving a landscape of despair as she raised

the revolver a ruler-length from his forehead.

She yanks tufts of tall fescue out of the ground,

and claws at the black earth with the wrench.

She wedges the bundle into the narrow hole

and bulldozes the dirt over the shallow grave.

She brushes off her knees, and wades back

to the car glinting in the sun. Jeremiah glares

as she plops herself behind the wheel,

and clunks the heavy door closed.

Sorry Jeremiah, she says, nature, you know.

She cranks the engine. The Chevy backfires.

Gunshots crack against the walls of her memory

just as they did among cathedral arches.

As they pull onto the road, Jeremiah cranes

his neck to watch trees, clouds and horses

fall into the abyss of the side view mirror.

Joshua Michael Stewart has had poems published in Massachusetts Review, Euphony, Rattle, Cold Mountain Review, William and Mary Review, Pedestal Magazine, Evansville Review and Blueline. Pudding House Publications published his Chapbook Vintage Gray in 2007. Finishing Line Press published his chapbook Sink Your Teeth into the Light in 2012 He lives in Ware, Massachusetts. Visit him at www.joshuamichaelstewart.yolasite.com