ISSUE: Winter 2015
we love them too much
to see them—
the young ones: cloaked
in their national faces of beauty /
safe in their ridiculous shoes :: warmed as if
wrapped in robes woven
from the hair of ancestors
we—their prairie handmaidens
we love them too much
to love them / we release them
like salmon to spawn and want them
to absorb us like pollen
take us up to be loaded /
fermented and spun into honey
or taken back
to be eaten and lived in—
chewed up and spat into comb