BY NOAH DAVIS
Mountain Salve
The beloved crushes nettles
into red sauce when her muscles
ache, chews fennel
when her stomach roils,
and when I slice my thumb
like the ripest plum
she wraps its two halves
in burdock leaves until the wound
fills quick as silt sluffing off
the clear-cut hills
our great-grandfathers left us
to live beneath.
Arguing Again in the Afternoon
Like nettles during rain
and blue jay feathers
neither of us gave
to the other.
Noah Davis grew up in Tipton, Pennsylvania, and writes about the Allegheny Front. His manuscript Of This River won the 2019 Wheelbarrow Emerging Poet Book Prize from Michigan State University’s Center for Poetry, and his poems and prose have appeared in The Sun, Best New Poets, Orion, North American Review, and River Teeth among others.
Process Note: These two poems come from my manuscript in progress that stitches the love of landscape and the love of an intimate partner together. I attempt to answer how the images and lives of the natural word intersect with the language we associate with human affection. What does this mean for how we treat the world around us?