the farm is gone its sweet shit smell that filled our young noses in those summers spent scooping grain from the silo floor now empty of its thieving mice and the cats that once hunted them unflinching between the stamp of hooves only to sleep full-bellied on the seats of a tattered sleigh which had touched no snow in my lifetime but carried my mother as a girl beneath blankets and musky furs across fields and snowed-in roads its single horse jingle-belling through northern winters but the whole thing hidden now high in the loft behind hay bales stacked thick by my own teen hands too soft, cut by twine and bleeding, my skin burnt and peeling and on sundays grateful for the cool water of a river where swimming was the only thing that mattered, not the price of milk or family spats or the threat of factory farms, us young and never dreaming that this could change while lying in the tall grass, the evening stars catching fire and my uncle calling the animals in from pasture
