by Laura Romeyn

It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!

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The jeep with its soft-top up
shreds past two small girls.

They are rushing the tallgrass
in matching violet nightgowns.

Wisconsin late summer.
Sun going down,

day like a bobbin
so warm. The air drags

low, circles its holdings
drifting there, then back

above. One of the girls,
the smaller one,

she kneels just in front
of the rhododendrons.

She has found something
in the green. A mid-section

undone, scratched open
to loosebelly softened

to the arbor of bone.
Grazed remains.

The lanes of the rib cage
carry their sidemeat,

fixed as the cold
of a silent and empty nave.

Put it in my hand
the older sister says,

and the younger one
reaches down and does.

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Laura Romeyn is the author of Wild Conditions, winner of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, her poems have appeared in AGNI, Harvard Review, The Missouri Review, and The Yale Review, among other journals. Born and raised in Wisconsin’s Driftless Region, Laura currently lives and teaches in Madison, Wisconsin.

by Laura Romeyn

The jeep with its soft-top up

shreds past two small girls.

They are rushing the tallgrass

in matching violet nightgowns.

Wisconsin late summer.

Sun going down,

day like a bobbin

so warm. The air drags

low, circles its holdings

drifting there, then back

above. One of the girls,

the smaller one,

she kneels just in front

of the rhododendrons.

She has found something

in the green. A mid-section

undone, scratched open

to loosebelly softened

to the arbor of bone.

Grazed remains.

The lanes of the rib cage

carry their sidemeat,

fixed as the cold

of a silent and empty nave.

Put it in my hand

the older sister says,

and the younger one

reaches down and does.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Laura Romeyn is the author of Wild Conditions, winner of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship (forthcoming spring 2019). A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University (2015-2017), her poems have appeared in AGNI, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Ninth Letter, and The Yale Review, among other journals. She lives and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area.