Excerpts

AUBADE WITH A BROKEN NECK The first night you don't come home summer rains shake the clematis. I bury the dead moth I found in our bed, scratch up a rutabaga and eat it rough with dirt. The dog finds me and presents between his gentle teeth a twitching nightjar. In her panic, she sings in his mouth. He gives me her pain like a gift, and I take it. I hear the cries of her young, greedy with need, expecting her return, but I don't let her go until I get into the house. I read the auspices-the way she flutters against the wallpaper's moldy roses means all can be lost. How she skims the ceiling means a storm approaches. You should see her in the beginnings of her fear, rushing at the starless window, her body a dart, her body the arrow of longing, aimed, as all desperate things are, to crash not into the object of desire, but into the darkness behind it. REGRET WITH WILDFLOWERS So much can hide in a field. A prairie dog can escape the hawk that devils it. A seed can wait until it is ready to be broken open, the earth ready to transform it. Today, aphids ravage the wildflowers, bison graze in the pasture, and I am returning home from another mistake. Of all my minor regrets, this is the worst- I let you assure me that desire is like a boy who throws rocks at a deer decaying in the river. That innocent. That brutal. I let you hold me down, let you draw my blood to the surface of my skin and call it an accident. But now I see how awful the sky is. How stark. How bare. How, when clouds expose the sun, horses tilt their heads with pleasure. DISCIPLINE WITH LINES FROM FIRST CORINTHIANS You try and teach me to be careful with my thoughts or else, when the day comes, my ashes may not ascend with the rest of the believers, but I can't help myself. I'm shy and susceptible to voices stirring in the clock at midnight whispering  Listen, I tell you a mystery: we will not all sleep, but we will all be changed. You say it is not the animal in us that loves to struggle, but the spirit that wants to be locked in the crucible of flesh until the soul burns clean. Mother,  I beat my body and make it my slave . I see a snake swallow its tail and know we are all infinite. Father, take me to the field where snow is melting through the ribs of the deer it covered all winter. There is a word inside every perishable thing aching to be spoken so it may live again. I've heard it. I found a bunting drowsing in the bushes, pinned back its wings and listened to its indigo lullaby, its song like last century's wind asking  How can some of you say there is no resurrection?  How could any of us be damned? COME BACK TO ME If you go to the ruins, a man will sell you the story of a queen for a kiss. This is the commerce of beauty. His lips. Your imagination. A moment of closed eyes and forgetting. He will tell you it is good luck to take your husband and lay him down on a tomb for a night, but when you say you're alone, he insists that this is better- to lay yourself down under a fire that has no heat and pray to the Tunisian moon for a barren orchard and an ocean without sharks. There is comfort in a lie, but there is also a thief who will take you unarmed in a dark town asking only for a kiss and the money in your wallet. And you will give it. Freely. Because a man asked for part of you, and because you've been alone for so long you've forgotten what a man tastes like. Because it's your last night in Africa and twelve dollars is not too much to lose. Because he says Come back to me even as you are showing him your breasts in the cemetery, and because, in truth, you like the way the moonlight looks on his skin. Excerpted from Rookery by Traci Brimhall All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.