She’s been here before. The grass takes skin
as payment—thought swells past its given size,
a swollen court convened to discipline
the body it inhabits and denies.
The sun impresses dull authority
upon her cheek, a mark that does not ask,
as if the field had staged her silently
with milkweed stalks and hydrangea husks.
She flares her nostrils. Breathing, she decides,
is thread pulled thin toward nothing she can see,
or cloudstuff waiting, stalled and undefined.
Meanwhile the sun, exact in appetite,
burns through the afternoon without appeal—
pure self, consuming what it cannot feel.