I used the brittle prairie colors
of our teenage July, endless
humid and plastic so

the day is hardly brittle, it is
anything but. I could draw a day
in my youthful comprehension.

Once wanting it so bad,
sticky day in wheel ruts
between the agriculture. Drawing,

I’m pretty pleased
with my haphazard,
my rapid manufacture: day.

We are limb slick, hood of my car,
I squint in the boy’s mouth, dull canvas
leg bent, antelope-ish,

green rough all around, the sun
is a yellow corner and all this
goes to indicate sun, field.

Here on my square of carpet. On TV
the small dad and the big dad, Dad
I’m trying to ask about

time’s irrelevance to imaginary
or reconstructed things here.
The boy is sweet as a message:

slow my heart, die. What’s not really real
is continually lost. The fridge
answers it in one way, the day

the corn went in crooked lines
we hold our sweat so close our noses
are almost touching. One answer.

Or we color sex from now on
as visitors from the prairie, after
everything a lonely country.

Alice Bolin