By Lindsay Adkins

Into that skin:

a lone bull curls

its throat back to neck.

Arc of horn.

Empty gray fields.

Pink eyelid of morning.

In high school they rumored tipping,

sparse fences missing posts, gaps

wide enough for past-curfew bodies.

I imagined the feeling of toppled animal,

immobility, a spine in the dirt,

the quiet sting of mosquitoes.

Before fear, before boot thunder

and the impossible shotgun

there are true stars and fragments

of knowing no living

thing moves on its own.

***

My mother’s love was not

a manmade material. She bought

me leather shoes to walk in.

Your feet need to breathe, she’d say,

the tiny lungs in my heels huffing

while she pressed her thumb

on my toe to measure room for growth.

Thrilling, to be found, to feel

where my body stopped and started.

Many times I’d watched her

or my father sift through bins

of frozen supermarket meat,

looking at cuts, dates, fat.

There was always a right choice.

***

We can choose

rawness, then. We can

choose to have a choice.

Last year, cotton, next year,

fruit and flowers. Leather

between, but we’ve already seen

my body give and stretch,

breathe to cocoon another,

no exchange of coin.

How am I both

animal and its empty dried out skin,

both what I was and what I will be?

Our daughter lies here

rubbing her back into the carpet,

unable yet to roll.

We can show her how to move,

how to reach forward, pull back

without coming apart.

Lindsay Adkins is a Western MA writer whose work has appeared in Electric Lit, Narrative, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Frontier Poetry, great weather for MEDIA, and Sugar House Review, among others. She is a recipient of the Amy Award from Poets & Writers and holds an MFA from Stony Brook Southampton.