Young Writers Society

I

Down old pastures, I find the color of my old pains. The things that sheltered me,

gave me clutch and cling before the world and my growing age.

Country roads that bleed down into a life that has bled from me,

these wrinkled, runny wrists, winding red down into the field

where the chickens and the children chase free; the children the fowl, and the fowl their chopped heads.

I am coming home to my burial grounds.

Scraping soil over my own body, remembering the close of my mother's arms around me.

I am lying down in my grave.

I am dying where I was saved.

II

Backwards, I am being born.

I am breathing new the old southern air. I am crying at my flesh and at the fresh sway of gathered hay.

I fist, grasp, suckle at an accent as heated as the country summer,

drawing at idioms, dumb with understanding.

This is not the womb any longer, I float in the embryonic fluid of the forest creek.

And if it don't rise, then this is not the world, and this indeed is the womb, and I am born still.

And it is beautiful. Has anyone supposed it lucky, to be born dead?