Brecken Rose Hancock - consider the body

Staring at your hand, you discover solitude
buried in the flesh. Here is your margin,
a fingertip, the place where one body ends.

I landed in Wolseley about 5 o’clock a.m. ,
June 24th 1897 . It was a lovely morning.

On the prairie you end in field, in sky,
in the stink of your sweat, the stench of cows.
Your hair bleaches white and you play
in the yard with a yellow dog after supper.
This is how your body forgets the ocean,
doesn’t miss the land where it was born.

Mr. Pan came and took me out to his farm. I was happy
to be there after the places I had lived in England.

You don’t want to remember the orphanage
so instead you concentrate on herding cattle,
the rhythm of running, the wind’s own tide.
The rise and fall of your breath at night is not
a sail catching, it is an echo of the prairie’s lung.

These farmers lived the best they knew.
It was like home.

Later, you’ll say that England is the kind of giant
that loses the buttons on its coat
and drinks and drinks to forget the cold.