Two poems by Sophia Stid

A True Story

I never told you the true story of the rabbits,
she said as she cut our ham into small pearled squares.
We chased peas around plates with our spoons,

our milk waiting cold and white and necessary.
She told us how the rabbits screamed human
screams when the army slit their throats

in the kitchen garden—sleeping farmhouse, curtains spilling
in a warm wind to the floor, windowsills of peeling paint,
maybe a shutter, somewhere, banging—

outside, blood mixing hay and mud.

Outside, the rabbits’ heads became bowls for blood,
hung like so—she said—by their feet from the wire fence,
dead eyes clotted with stars. She had been hiding

but she found them like that in the morning,
stars and all. And she said that was the story
we were old enough to know.

The years it took to know
no army comes for rabbits. How strangely
she had loved us. What we had been spared.

The Only Rule of Citrus Is Abundance

Always more than we can eat. Oranges letting
themselves down in the night with soft thudding jolts,

the sound of realization. And in the morning, all the fallen
epiphanies scattered dumb across the grass, not a tongue

to speak what they learned in their inevitable surrender.
Landscape with waste. Landscape with numb matter.

I remember being young enough to care about oranges
being hurt. Breathless, I held out my skirt to catch them,

trying to anticipate. Landscape with girl watching
oranges deepen in blue air. My mother said, I love

your heart. Landscape with a woman finding words
to explain what can hurt in this world and what cannot.

We sat together on winter grass the color of thirst,
our laps crowded with fruit we would not eat. I showed her

how I could roll an orange in my palm, feeling
for its fontanel—the soft flat where it first fell. I tried,

when I ate, to taste for that marked space. The necessary
wound. I never could. I am trying to undo the notion

that any wound is necessary. Landscape, revising.
Landscape with epiphany. Landscape with bleeding

heart. Landscape I did not earn and do not deserve—
the gift of the fist of my shame, twisting, the day

I watched an orange fall and didn’t feel it. When
the concrete sidewalk felt like a fact, instead of

an oppression laid heavy over the earth. Levied.
Beneath which, earthskin, feathers, footsteps

of animals long-dead, deer trails, arrowheads—
all the other ways it could have gone, all the ways

this earth didn’t have to hurt. Landscape with orange trees
and empathy, unboundaried. I am trying to live my way back.

Sophia Stid is a writer from California. She is the winner of the 2017 Francine Ringold Award for New Writers and the 2019 Witness Literary Award in Poetry. Her poems and essays can be found in Image, Ninth Letter, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Crab Orchard Review, among others.