Shock of Corn

poetry by Sean Patrick Hill

This morning I dreamed of a woman
whose vagina was two ears
of corn.
I don’t know what this has to do
with my mother,
who let me loose in the cornfields
with a knife.

Maybe it was the shock
of stealing into fields at dark,
stealing stalks,
thinking what I did was wrong
when we propped the shock around the lamppost
at the end of our driveway,
where a plaque with our name
once hung.

But I know what is has
to do with me, older, in a grocery store
where they sold Indian corn
with dry husks peeled back.
I held an ear in each hand;
when I fluttered them they sounded like doves
lifting off the earth.

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Sean Patrick Hill is a freelance writer, naturalist, and teacher living in Portland, Oregon. He earned his MA in Writing from Portland State University, where he won the Burnham Graduate Award. He received a grant from Regional Arts and Culture Council and residencies from Montana Artists Refuge, Fishtrap, and the Oregon State University Trillium Project. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Exquisite Corpse, elimae, Alba, diode, In Posse Review, Willow Springs, RealPoetik, The Pedestal Magazine, The Battered Suitcase, Unlikely 2.0, The Foliate Oak, Sugar Mule, Sawbuck, and Quarter After Eight. His blog site is theimaginedfield.blogspot.com.