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 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. 
