
Asha Dore
Saturday on the Farm
Samantha Moe
Young deer, a god, mold-girl with a lamb full of stars following her heels, the sky falls apart and
the forest is full of dirt and blood, why does it matter, the trees don’t care about keeping their
leaves clean, knitting shades of green together until the sky is no longer visible, the problem was
never the power, never the way evening rinsed the field like a storm, not a problem the way the
lantern sings and smacks against a barn’s sides, oh the barn, bundles of straws and benches
waiting to be stained, she steps across thresholds and commands electricity in the house, she
takes ribs from her dinner and makes new, smaller, girl-gods whose small hands, smaller than her
pupils, help her pour hot water for tea, they go off in pairs of two and three to fetch her napkin
boxes, they sleep late and eat portobello mushrooms full of soup, they hate clam chowder and the
feeling of the refrigerator chill on their skin, they don’t intervene when the girl is on her knees
again, bathroom rug full of buttons, and outside no one knows the weather or the way back
home, no one cares about protection, the girl and the smaller girls, and they’re gods with their
seared oyster mushrooms and snow peas, their arms heavy with enoki bulbs, their eyes full of
heartbreak and their hair needing to be combed, they peel skin from cod, they polish bowls, they
sing out the window in the night when the girl has cracked her heart open and instead of finding
a valve she finds a leech, instead of finding salvation she finds meatballs and zucchini discs, she
finds hums and trumpets and pythons, prosciutto and ribbon pasta in a creamy wine sauce,
she unzips her body and out falls eggs, beautiful blushing chanterelle, enchanting girolle, a hedgehog
and a history, a mortal girl who has already been swallowed and killed, also too, for no reason in
particular: the beak of a sparrow, a noodle soup her mother used to love, blanket fish and eagle
rays, salt from a nearby ocean and hands cupping snails and pale green mist, the gods all cry,
crawl home, Heaven opens her soft arms and everyone runs forward but some of the lambs are
missing her arms and some of the girls are devoured by the tall weed grass.
Samantha Moe is the recipient of a 2023 St. Joe community Foundation Poetry Fellowship from Longleaf Writers Conference. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from Whale Road Review, The Indianapolis Review, Beaver Mag, and others. Her poetry book Heart Weeds is out from Alien Buddha Press and her chapbook Grief Birds is forthcoming from Bullshit Lit in April ’23. Her full-length Cicatrizing the Daughters is forthcoming from FlowerSong Press. You can find them on social media as @SamAnneMoe.