by Eva Birch
The walk up the hill is what a good farmer might call normal but it’s pretty good. A cow path that’s concrete, a sentence not a line. It’s abstract to me, how broken stones get mixed with water. What is it that writers herded together say? Autobiography is for losers not poets. I’m a poem, the one I lost when I was twenty about cow’s eyes. Their feet make whole homes for arriving rain. My gumboots bend full circle, slowing down the way I see smoke where there’s mist. The tank’s the round middle, empty except for a dead bird, its feathers to put in caps, its signs for freedom or comedy. Our neighbour used to maintain the tank and the creek, like pens and books, like friends and divinity, as a source. They say it’s possible to fish water. But I can only find mud and its fucking freezing. They say it’s the ride not the saloon. And it’s my loving of the fixing and also the stopping and thawing, that makes the pipe open and the water start gushing.
Eva Birch is a poet and psychoanalyst in training. She has published her poetry in Verge, Cordite Poetry Review, Sick Leave, and Codette, among others. She is the author of three chapbooks: Megalodon (SoD press, 2019), We Eat Out Together: My Heart Cam (in collaboration with the We Eat Out Together collective, 2020), and Sun’s Window (in collaboration with Kieren Seymour, 2021).
Hyades Magazine 