Periphery by Meg Shevenock

My mother found solace in a man who kept sheep.

Sometimes she took me with her to his farm.

Our Chrysler climbed the mountain, my elbow crooked in slow air.

I didn’t know a mountain could be a farm.

On a craggy, sloping surface, a green field. 

I stood there, looking. 

My ugliest time as a child, made me love the animals more.

We threw slices of stale white bread into the field.

The sheep arrived, burly around my knees, powerful as waves.

So close as this sea, bread landed on their backs. 

I’d lift a slice from one sheep and hand it to another.

Left alone in it, as I wished.

Once, I saw a six-foot black snake rope through rocks and turn to glitter. 

Once, I pulled a quiet pink lamb from the warm envelope of her mother. 

The hardest part, the bleating.

I did not ask, What is the meaning?

Once, the farmer’s toothless father ambled out in his pajamas to explain the origin of bitch.

I magnified the sky, wondering the rifle like a splint along my arm. 

Snake’s weight. Silent.

The lamb weighed a handful of flour when I lowered her into the hole.

The center was so certain.

They would go away again.

I followed the sheep’s frantic jostle, their choreographed intuition.

Palm in wool, I fell through clouds for the promise of solidity. Heart in there. Breath in there. 

Hoofs softened by decades of pounded dirt, the hundred ears flick-flick, everywhere flick-flick.

In drain-water light, I left my hood strings untied. 

Nothing sudden where periphery brings endless alarm. 

Stilled like this in the light’s pencil slant, I drifted.

Until each time my mother reappeared like a moon and said, Let’s go. 

From the earth with one finger, I held to my lips.

Her face clear and wide beside a hook. 

Some trees, her hair. 

Meg Shevenock’s poetry book, The Miraculous, Sometimes, was selected by Bob Hicok as winner of the 2019 Marystina Santiestevan first book prize for Conduit Books & Ephemera. Her poems and essays have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Lana Turner, jubilat, Fence, Best New Poets, Kenyon Reviewblog, and elsewhere. 

15 January 2024