My mother is a pine box, unfinished,
sap still sticky at the seams. She is the curled
moon I’ll scoop from the sky and wring
like a dishrag. My mother is the second note
in a meadowlark’s call. She’s the five minutes
of pressing highway before I arrive
home. My mother is the broken-down
bar, the spotted horse watching rotten
pickups drive Old Divide. She is sweetgrass.
When I die, all that I ask is that no one goes
looking for me. I have a standing appointment.
I’ll be busy in a moonless night,
waiting for the matchstick scratch
of meteors sparking the sky. Eyes.
My mother saying, please
visit any time you’d like.
–
Daniel Lurie is a Jewish, rural writer from eastern Montana. He is the co-editor of Outskirts Literary Journal, and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Pleiades, North American Review, Reed, and others. He serves as a 2026-2028 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.