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 the current Ronald Wallace Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.