Demolish a Small Grove by Rebecca Kinzie Bastian

Demolish a Small Grove

Thorn-stitched, my ankle bleeds.
Blooms across the floor. Petals and petals.

The garden is weeds. There are weeds at the door.
Click and whirr, beetles mate among stalks.
Our dog is lost in tangle, wild as she is.

A second whistle. Sound’s entirety in the holes.
Come in. Come inside.
Under my breath, another sound.

It is the evening sky opening. Its arms still
full of Caddisflies hatched over the stream.
But this is the year of mosquito and itchweed.

Walnuts poison even the raised beds. A gas well
fractures Blessing Mountain. There isn’t enough rain. And then.
All these black butterflies.

Behind my closed lids, seabirds. Iridescent. Extinguished.
Wings and eyes. On the sand.

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Rebecca Kinzie Bastian’s work appears in a number of journals, most recently Rhino, Pax Americana , and Coal Hill Review, and Pebble Lake Review and Frostwriting, with a poem forthcoming from The American Poetry Journal. She was the 2007 Bread Loaf Margaret Bridgman Scholar, and shortlisted for The Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award from Red Hen Press. Born and raised in Sweden, she holds an MFA from Vermont College, and currently works as an editor and copywriter in Pennsylvania, where she lives with her husband and two sons.