Cows chew sideways. In childhood, we spent hours, cumulatively days, weeks, feeding the placid beasts. It sounds like breath, blazing under all of the industry. Three syllables in four letters, and nothing truly consonant. I was too young to know what it was; snow-socked winters, hazelnut trees, fires luminous at Thanksgiving, Christmas. Powerlines down. It rained so much more than it does now, here, which is elsewhere. My skin is always dry, flaking away from the rest of me.
My grandparents’ house was once a part of the Underground Railroad. I remember green. Those rooms in the grey basement, low-ceilinged and everything curved, the cellar door that no one used. To think that it had once opened to air. Geographically suspended, a nowhere space, a limbo, a place to rest. Once, my mother had a tea party and the cows made it through the fence to wander her flower gardens, entirely unmoved by her distress. I was amused by the cows. I have made every possible mistake. For years, it has amazed me that birds can sleep on wires, on branches, that this is how they hold rest, their hands relaxed when wrapped around narrow shafts, unstable when open. I still believe that cows can sleep while standing, despite credible indication to the contrary. It was not until recently that I half-woke, sprawled in a bed, to find my own hands curled around something I could not see, perhaps a bit of nowhere.
