Issue > Poetry
Gretchen Primack

Gretchen Primack

Gretchen Primack's publication credits include The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, FIELD, New Orleans Review, Best New Poets 2006, and others. Her chapbook, The Slow Creaking of the Planets (Finishing Line Press, 2007), has been shortlisted for several prizes. She lives in the Hudson Valley with a beloved human and many beloved animals, and teaches at Bard College and two local prisons through the Bard Prison Initiative.

Hall Farm

You're blackberries—turn black
already. The thorns are in place,
your skin is pebbled, the flowers
you used to be declared you loud
enough to startle toads.

Wind skims the skin from the pond.
Spiders move their kite strings overhead
and the frogs are waving bullhorns.

Orange robin, tangled in the berries,
you're jumping the gun. They aren't
ready yet, though every cell around
tells them different. Jerky little miss,
my stomach is a hot shoe of pollen
and honey. Tell us something from
your jagged beak.

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