I learn today, if tampered upon, some maize strains can reach forty feet, and I wonder if corn that tall could retake me to my six-year-old frame, where from my broken window, i’d nearly hear the wind dehisce a single tassel, wrest seed from shell, slump stalk obeisant while its neighbor’s silken fingers grasped pollen, each nascent kernel waiting, bated breath, the way
i hold my own, no longer interloping the rolling green, stamped right to the soil itself, mud caking my best shoes as i tramp after neighbor alex’s cat, which darted between table legs & chairs & us, through screen door to slinking shadows of sun tangled in whorling sprouts & husks, and we without a second thought chose nothing but to follow. now we’re lost, alex’s voice echoing so like her momma’s when she calls us in for dinner, so unlike the day she told me she didn’t have a daddy. our panting
paints our wake with fog that floats above tousled tips flowering long after dusk tucks me crisp in sheets & linen dreams where i sprint the fields again, this time fast enough to break into flight, and i wonder who quilted the land mechanical, patches manmade, instead of wild webs of spritely bugs & mice, and even rats of which my parents warned but who i’ve yet to see, until I look up
dehiscence in the dictionary 17 years later
— (in plants) the split-
ting at maturity along a built-in line of weakness in order to release its contents, sometimes involving the complete
detachment of a part —
it makes sense like running, when i’m not supposed to be in the neighbors’ kitchen, into alex’s stumbling dad and i’m maybe seven, reeling from humid slurred- rodent breath that backs me out a house i can leave, and i’ve no words to name him, only yes/no, the adults’ tired game, twenty questions, did he touch you— we don’t want you being there again, but before that now we’re in a field without our parents’
blessing, and alex grabs my hand to stop me in crowded cricket descant & coming sanguine moon, says, i feel safe, and I don’t know but i do know, and she drags me headlong, plummets arteries occidental of Ohio’s murmured, beaten heart where we & blooded roots entwine our claws to play.