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A Spell Which Makes Use of Goat Shit

By Aubrey Ryan
Poetry•Vol. XXVII No. 3 (Winter 2014)

When morning is car and car, and the river
is high with winter trash, I bundle my son. I bridge us both

to Hannah’s house. We follow Hannah
down and up again

the wet hay hills. In her wool, with her bear pelt hair, I could
believe her anything: a log-green

saint, a Thousandfurs,
a hawk song in form. We’re looking for renegade

goats. We’re hollering:
hey goats! I’ve Arlo on my hip,

and Viven is burred to her back. These boys born hours apart,
two years past, in snow. When the lost ones come

bleating toward us, two deer are with them, too
then gone inside the hills. They were the color of the field

and the long dead leaves, and now it seems for all the world to be
a living day: my son mucking in goat mud when a goatling

bit his ear enough to not draw blood, though if he bled
here, he’d be one day growing green.

Aubrey Ryan
Aubrey Ryan lives in Iowa with her husband and son. Her work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in Matter, Kindred, Anti-, El Aleph, Quarterly West, Squat Birth Journal, The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, and other publications. Her chapbook, Good Beast, is forthcoming from Phantom Limb Press.

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