Sophie Klahr

from LIKE NEBRASKA

She listens like a horse

Patiently broken in

By the Good Lord himself.

There is no softer way.

In each scar, a story—

Pale comma of a slipped saw,

A welding spark.

In fields never razed for crops,

Bright insects part like waters

Where anyone walks.

Easy talk among the workers:

Irrigation bled into a wet spring,

Low ground now a stream

Ripe with frog-song.

The farmer is mowing a path

In what has gone

To seed. A body seen

Hovering among the goldenrod.

SOPHIE KLAHR has had poetry appear in AGNI, American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, and Ploughshares. She is the author of the full-length collection Meet Me Here At Dawn (YesYes Books) and the chapbook Versus Recovery (Pilot Books). She lives sometimes in California and sometimes in Nebraska.