BY TODD DAVIS

Bad Seed

Before her boyfriend leaves for Fort Bragg,

she lays with him between gnarled

trunks in the tall grass. The orchard’s

hair is tangled, the fruit small and sour.

The family that labored this hollow

fled forty years before. No one visits

to pick anymore. The clouds move fast,

and she feels a pinprick, like fire

as thumb and forefinger pinch candle-flame.

Looking up, she sees the indented

foreheads of apples, sunken cheeks,

the chins cleft at odd angles.

Snapper

In May, even in rain, she walks the river

searching for orphaned goslings, ducklings

cast off. Her brother laughs when he steers

the canoe, separating a small bird from a gaggle.

She looks back and out of the wake an open

mouth. Smear on the surface the only sign

of theft. Over supper her mother swears

the gosling felt nothing. The girl knows better

than anyone the gravel banks where the turtles

bury their eggs. She carries an awl she stole

from her father’s workbench. For every

duck or goose they take, she pierces the side

of a shell, turns it over so the yolk oozes out.

Todd Davis is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Native Species and Winterkill. He has won the Midwest Book Award, the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Bronze and Silver Awards, the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, and the Chautauqua Editors Prize. He teaches environmental studies at Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona College.

Process Note: These poems are part of my next book, Coffin Honey, which tries to offer voice to the experiences of people in Appalachia. They tell small individual stories, like a young girl angry with the predation of snapping turtles on ducklings and goslings, in the broader context of poverty, environmental racism, and climate collapse.