Buried in the Corn
by Sophie Whitten
In the back field budding with lanky corn stalks,
where the deer tramp over the ground
and the birds pluck at scraps of broken branches,
my childhood is buried with the golf balls
my father drove into its soil from across
the cloudy, olive pond twenty years ago,
where, with a rusted tin pail between our hands
my sister and I trodded through the empty rows
shelling forgotten ears of corn, our thumbs
wringing the gold teeth from their gums.
We brought the yield to our uncle.
He offered us both a quarter for our work.
My childhood’s buried beneath the cardboard boxes
we dragged into the field to make a fort
but left for the farmers to find weeks later,
jammed between the blades of their combine,
thick and soggy with rain and mud
like a soiled diaper abandoned in the dirt,
where the dogs ran down a fawn
and pulled his hind leg from its joint,
their teeth sinking into his skin. I cried.
From the back porch, I wailed for them
to let go of the crying baby, tears and sweat
and slobber pooling down my chin.
There my childhood breathes the same breath
as the earth, mumbling the stories of my youth,
and when my body is lowered into the black soil,
I will crawl from my casket back to those fields
where my memories turn over with the seasons
as the farmers till the land.