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La Mancha, Afterwards

By Sarah Crossland
Poetry•Vol. XXIX No. 1 (Spring 2016)

Every night I hear the windmills
 
walking. Behind the blades,
the sun closes like a black
 
eye vesseled like an insect’s storm-
 
torn wing. That’s beating
in my head. In sleep, my sheets
 
become the coat of armor
 
that the knight of mirrors
wore: plackart, crest, and collar
 
the blue the reverse of the sea.
 
The horse’s winds still singe
my hands as if a kind of fire—
 
my skin is slate with it.
 
Because the body is a siege
engine, because I charged
 
into the fly-thrummed sky.
 
This is the way that ghosts
talk. Where the windmills walk,
 
wildflowers gnarl in defeat.

Sarah Crossland
Sarah Crossland has poems published or forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Shenandoah, FIELD, TriQuarterly, The Iowa Review, A Public Space, Denver Quarterly, Guernica, and other journals. She currently lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, and is at work writing a book of poems about the Romanov daughters and Slavic folklore called The Winter Palace. Her website is sarahcrossland.com.

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