Musings Between a Field of Grain & Downtown Birmingham
by Lexi Lord
I was blessed to be able to eat bones. Death drops them off on Sundays if they’re too soft for her dogs. She blinks back shadows to keep them white. I gnaw on the remains of priests and Microsoft engineers, and I grow full of it quickly. Sometimes, I sit down in the graveyard across the street from my school, and I spit out the sinews into the grass. I imagine that if I fertilize the dead man’s land with evidence of his life, someday there a great field may grow, gold and beautiful and reaching to enshrine this dirty city. It would grow like this poem– without cares, in grace. But, if buried bodies can’t fertilize soil, I doubt that bones & words will.
Lord is a young writer from Birmingham, Alabama. Her work has been previously commended by the High School Literary Arts Awards and the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, among others. Most days, she can be found with a cup of overpriced tea and a conceptually unusual movie.