Three Poems by Liz Prather



Someone Neither of Us Ever Were

When the mother wrestled 
with angels, the hip bone of the daughter ached. 

the sun 
will rise
she will 
be given 
a new name

Like longsuffering dreams of cotton, daughters are the
wet towels on a line 
strung under hot clouds. 

We lived here, a winsome mother and a lose some daughter
the barn owls clocked the hours of the night
between one unsaid thing and the next 

Only house wrens spoke the clatter of battlements long defended
Out loud and twitterpatted while we tended a nest of whispers

When the clothes
were folded and put away, 
we read the heavily scripted novellas of old memories
where we looked 
like each other but not ourselves,
plump and undeserving and ruddy in our youth. 


*


Momma Killdeer

The brown marble of plowed fields
uncommon heat of a rainy May
She’s walking back from the old house 
to the new house they’ve built on the ridge
The clods make slow going
Her heel falling and twisting
The sun solstice bright in the eastern sky
splayed out over the blue just now
Ahead of her, always ahead of her boots
the mother killdeer is frantic, 
squeeing her away from the babies
which aren’t even babies 
just shell nuts on the ground
where the John Deere will run them over 
any day now when the planting starts. 
She puts a hand to her eyes and surveys
all that is hers and reckons she’ll 
die one day like everything else.


*


Young Girls Intent on Becoming

she decided to look for the way home, a silly girl with silly thoughts camping in dark woods and avoiding bright paths where a ranger told her raw meat was the opposite of what she needed but if she split herself in two and came back as the moon and not the finger pointing to the moon, she would be welcomed as a scold for herself to advise when she’s in a dark mood, he suggested, just ask the moon where it goes to be happy and that would be the trailhead to truth telling but you’re just a forest ranger for god’s sake, she thought, so she avoided the moon and gathered up as much pea gravel and tumbled glass as her bonny apron could hold and went ass-over into a volcano, untouched, virginal, pure, just as nature intended.



Liz Prather’s work has appeared in The Georgia Review, McSweeney’s, and The English Journal. Prather is the co-director of the Kentucky Writing Project, has authored three books on teaching writing with Heinemann Press and holds an MFA as a Michener Fellow from University of Texas-Austin. She lives in Montgomery County, Kentucky.



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