Two Poems by Meg Thompson

A robin one day after the rain storm,

dull breast dreaming
with worms on the sidewalk
ten feet in front of me, babies still
commas inside of her curving to eggs,
I remember an English teacher who spoke
her punctuation: Megan, comma, will you please
turn on the lights, question mark? I think of her while
grading my college sophomores, their papers fat with amazing
mistakes, but they don’t much care Vonnegut said semi-colons
were hermaphrodites, nor do they see the rain speckling
their jackets as periods, the ends to sentences from the
sky. My robin hops into some mulch,
the writing on the pavement dead
earthworms dried to cursive
anyhow.

Five-Foot Farmer

They built a golf course next to the farm I grew up on.
Women in salmon-colored polo shirts flip sand wedges,
red from the dust and clay and sun into the air

and knock my dad in the head with a golf ball when
he’s driving the International, rolling up leftover bean stubble
for the cows. The tractor, a loud one that vibrates windows,

drowns the tremolo of sheep, moves without him.
Had he been sitting when he drove, the balls would have
just nipped the top of his hat. Now they plop

into the topsoil, surrounding him like unwashed eggs.
He would never sit, my mom tells the sheriff. He was
too short to see. My dad buried in a midwestern plain,

I try to remember how loam feels, bright and black,
turned over and over by dozens of blades.
I wander malls for perfume that smells like second-cutting hay.

Meg Thompson lives in Cleveland, OH. Recently her work has appeared in JMWW, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and PANK. Her chapbook, Farmer, is forthcoming from Kattywompus Press.

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