[extraction]
Lindsay Turner
Mountain Poppies
Let us talk about what walks the earth now:
Next door the sirens set off dogs who howled,
wolf-throated. I didn’t really mind.
A slash of poppies appeared down by the ditch like the mark of a claw,
A bear, a wolf, some kind of angry monster.
Sometimes the air turned cold and low—technically we were in the clouds.
It was not at all like floating, not at all like flying
or like swimming. I was slow and clumsy.
Slash of poppies, mallard ducks, a dust-puff in the sun,
A jumping blue-fanged spider. A trigger, a thread.
But from my heart was pulled a cry, pure as a gun.
Lindsay Turner is the author of the poetry collection Songs & Ballads (Prelude Books, 2018) and the forthcoming poetry chapbook A Fortnight (Doublecross Press) and the translator of several books of contemporary Francophone poetry and philosophy. Originally from northeast Tennessee, she lives in Denver, where she is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver.