I keep following you home / maybe this time we’ll be beautiful

By Sam Moe

We’re alone. The lambs and the dogs have gone
into lilac pastures where sticky circles and dried
mud lay undisrupted, your house feels hundreds
of miles away and each time I look back I see it
deflating until your dishes and kitchens and bedside
tables are nothing more than a puffy glowing
thing in the grass.

Next to me, you’re making bold claims about love
sweeping the air with your hands, trying to conjure
the woman of your dreams out of the last dewdrops
of June-dawn, I told the others I’d never trust you
again yet we’re out here, combing animal hair out
of our clothes at night, asking one another if we’d
like more milk heated on the stove, pouring coffee
shaving pale cheese into a bowl, digging viridescent
rose peaches out of their hiding places in the back
garden.

Your eyes, normally hazel hued, turn bright in setting
sun. Soon it will be dark, soon there will be dogs
with jaws and their soft friends come to lead us back
to the house, I don’t have the strength to tell you
I want to stay right here; I want to live on this patch
of weeds until my heart falls apart and I begin a final
unraveling. It wasn’t automatic. We walked horses
across streams and I hated your boots, your hands
the holes in your jeans, I went to bed frustrated by
simple human gestures which haunted me, woke up
twisted in sheets and your bird got into my room
again, now the animals are singing at four in the
morning, the moon has disappeared, I hear you
slow walk out of your room, knocking on her door
so you can feed the chickens together from slightly
rusted pails.

I know there’s a way out of this space, yet I want to
stay lost, I hate when you tell me to stop resisting
softness, I don’t believe you, don’t believe there is
an ending, I’m going to follow you back inside and
anyway, whoever knows what’s going on, who else
have you invited to witness your hungry thunder
longing, there are so many of us sitting, sleeping
talking in the field, I don’t know why I wake up
every day and crawl back to you, I’ll leave and you
won’t come with me, if I were to walk straight into
the setting sun you wouldn’t come with begs and
tears, you resist the paths I walk, I’m getting so sick
of this but I can’t give up.

Later, we eat dinner outside. Everyone laughs at
your jokes; you take turns twisting the knife into
a roast still coated in cooking strings. She told you
she wanted you back and now we have to suffer
through dinner-as-theatre, dinner-as-excuse, dinner
full of claws and fog, the red of the shed, I want
someone to take me out back and place me soft by
the half-broken horse ring, this isn’t about heels
or hearts or literally trust, I woke up crying again
and baby I want the pine trees with their permanent
leaves, I want navy-blue shivers, I wouldn’t mind
coffee grinds in a chipped mug, I want reasons to
take my heart to the waiting, jawed things, I could
toss the pulpy lattice off, play it cool like I have an
apple or a bundle of sweaty blueberries stuck together
in a drama, next thing you know the creatures are
biting at my tendons and I’m disappearing before
night, before longing, before velvet green grass
regrowing next spring.

Again, I stay. I say yes when someone asks to feed
me a spoonful of something hot and delicious. We
keep smiling at each other, I can hear my grandmother
asking me if I know the difference between gratitude
and gañir, gimotear and geraniums in her hair, I
accidentally push my wine glass onto the bricks, and
no one cares but you. In the kitchen, you kiss Cabernet
Sauvignon off my thighs and the others wave to me,
I pretend I’m washing a hand in the sink, covering my
mouth with my fingers, I fake-laugh and you take my
heart all the way out of its case.

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Sam Moe is the first-place winner of Invisible City’s Blurred Genres contest in 2022. Her first chapbook, “Heart Weeds,” is out from Alien Buddha Press and her second chapbook, “Grief Birds,” is forthcoming from Bullshit Lit in April 2023. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram as @SamAnneMoe.