​

​​

​The girl in the field

is my sister. I know
it’s hard to tell

with the sun blazing

the horizon. She’s almost
only a silhouette.

I don’t remember when

the camera captured
this version of her,

though it looks like midsummer,

a sabbath, sway and golden.
Her hair flung out behind her,

she could very well be dancing.

It’s curious
how sometimes you have no memory

of a day in your own life,

only an image
as evidence.

She is so young.

The seeds
of weeds around her

glow in the light.

The days were so long
they could have been forever.

 

After the Deluge

Children of the backwoods, my sister and I
     had seen bones,
hollow bones of songbirds, tender skeletons
     of deer scattered
by scavengers. These were the victims we swore
     we would never become.
Still young, we crossed the borders of our yard,
     the edges of the wild.
A bridge marked the boundary of what we knew
     from what we didn’t,
and there, in the stream below, we found
     a skull, a pale empty form
that once wore a long face. No other trace
     could we find.
Just this. Every instinct eroded.
     Every fear gone
from these sharp contours settled among
     rocks, weeds
woven throughout. It could have been
    a dinosaur
for all we knew, a creature that survived
     the millennia
to find its end here where we could tell
     its story.
But there was no body, no evidence
     there were ever
ribs or lungs or legs. We reasoned
     it had washed downstream,
this skull moved by flood as though it could yet
     fill with thought,
overflow, and we could go with it.
 

​

​

 

David B. Prather is the author of three poetry collections: We Were Birds (Main Street Rag, 2019), Shouting at an Empty House (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2023), and Bending Light with Bare Hands (Fernwood Press, 2025). His work has appeared in many publications, including New Ohio Review, Prairie Schooner, Gargoyle, The Comstock Review, Cutleaf, Poet Lore, etc. He lives in Parkersburg, WV.
 

​