How You Put Me On My Back in the Thistles: A(field) Ekphrasonnet

Why am I a butter-headed flower
among the rabbits

I said why am I a butter head
among the rabid

 I said it I’ll say it again why am I crouching here
like a bidder biding my teeth

 *

I won’t wear a dress without pockets — I won’t —

A dress without pockets is a daffodil stem
so self-conscious

 A buttercup is better prepared for a pandemic

*

Your hare-ears are better than my butter head
Your hairy hearing better than my buddy

I wanted to go to bed with you I wanted to

Now we’re ten feet apart in every direction

ξ

The Brain — is Wider Than the Sky —

of ghost dresses choking
a shop window in Edinburgh 

the morning after we floated a cemetery where they chained
down the dead so no one could recycle

their organs       the watches vigilant as poets (— “I can’t possibly” —)

Or how the antique spoons cost one pound exactly one pound more
than the admission to the National Museum

which I walked entirely on my toes      like a victim
waiting for it to fall it was so stuck-throated    so live-crab

Somewhere in that broad expanse
swans still landing on the pond of my — wider than —

This is a letter to K from the edgefield brimming
I said this         is from Ancient Greek to prepare

again from: holding a mirror up to the ocean
and staring       we know

My version of Sisyphus
is going back to the same spot where the blueweed flattens

under the former weight of last night’s sleeper
its hooves curled birdly as we curl coiling those innocent paroxysms

patient to become beaks      or howls —

ξ

Maya Jewell Zeller is the author of the interdisciplinary collaboration (with visual artist Carrie DeBacker) Alchemy For Cells & Other Beasts (Entre Rios Books 2017), the chapbook Yesterday, the Bees (Floating Bridge Press 2015), and the poetry collection Rust Fish (Lost Horse Press 2011); her prose appears in such places as Brevity, Bellingham Review, and Booth Journal. Recipient of a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation as well as a Residency in the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, Maya has presented her work internationally at the University of Oxford and in Madrid at the Unamuno Author Festival. Currently, she teaches writing for Central Washington University and edits for Scablands Books, and is at work on a memoir called Maya and the Whales. Find her on Twitter @MayaJZeller or visit mayajewellzeller.com for more info.