Poem #2: Prose poetry chain

Jenny Boully

LANDSCAPE I

There are clouds, or no clouds, or bright clouds, or sometimes clouds, yellow and pink underbelly clouds. These were things that happened outside—the old cow getting dry, so dry. We dreamt that the line on the horizon would open like an earthquake or like the palms of some god or other. It's blue there, way over there, a silver blue; I think they call it midnight. But when you get there, it will only be like this, like these mountains, like these trees, the same earth brown, the same moss green slickening everything. Oh, lonely chickens, count your chickens; that very mean man said that one day, you would be compared to her. Sometimes, we don't know what to make a nest out of; sometimes, we take what we can hold. It's lovely there, over there, way over there; I think they call it love or something or other. But one day, the sky will open up; and one day, someone else's cow will come a-munching on your land, on your grazing grass, on your carefully planted rows of buckwheat and corn. When the belly is slit, when the belly is slit, you'll see: the sow would have given birth; she would have given birth to pigs three.

Jenny Boully

Jenny Boully is the author of The Book of Beginnings and Endings (Sarabande Books), [one love affair]* (Tarpaulin Sky Press) and The Body: An Essay (Essay Press). She is currently a Ph.D. Candidate at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.