139. To the Stars Through Difficulties: Rachel White

I say revisit, but the word feels off—the farm is my home as much
as my own skin. Would I also claim to revisit my face at the mirror
each morning? I touch the rash-blotches and the lichen-clots that coat
the rungs of the silo ladder. This place has gone haggard and aged—the hog-lot
is hogless; the bloodweed’s taken over. Carpenter bees hum
and bore into beams that brace the slack roof of the feeding floor.
Half of a hackberry tree crashed here in the push of an old storm.
It rains now—a possum’s jaw gets peppered with mud-splats—I remember
the bones and the smell of hogs, the wet squeal and shit, the shimmering teeth
clipped, how some pearly bits flung up into the air and caught the light.

— Rachel White