The Yellow Field

Somewhere in that critical hour before supper I lost my appetite, all of it, just as my strict Nanna used to warn against when she set out the sweets. My other grandma would light a cigarette & gently shoo us out of the house so she & grandpa could enjoy their cocktail hour – ah! – alone.

Peace without children, yellow field where I dissolve, finally, into a murmur of bees.

Given a field of yellow, the weather doesn’t matter. Given water from the ground or the sky & my own, too-corrosive minerals, given a season of ice, fissures growing wherever the rhizomes can get their fingers in past the knuckle, prizing the dead stone open along its seam of gleaming yellow: a field spreads wherever I used to feel hunger.

I stand in the middle of it at sundown, still as a tall stump that doesn’t belong, watching for the brilliant wings of monarch butterflies beating, gliding, searching for a one-night hat stand. I could be the spot marked Mexico on a yellow map. My shadow stretches into the distant woods.