When The Cold Names Its Ghosts

Most afternoons, I sweet tea through fields
of grief where prophets gather to feed.

The chickens have gone to roost. Soft mouthed
bears come calling. All winter

this was how I saw them. Even when floods
drowned the moon, those sibyls were out

of order, sowing wishbones along the path.
Old songs uncover thorns. Pluck these

feather-bones, pare the blood beneath my nails.
Most afternoons, I renounce everything. I am

staying forsaken, keeping a few claws in a drawer,
giving way to vagrant lovers.

Ronda Broatch is the author of Shedding Our Skins (Finishing Line Press, 2008) and Some Other Eden (2005). Nominated seven times for the Pushcart Prize, Ronda is the recipient of an Artist Trust GAP Grant, and a May Swenson Poetry Award finalist. Moon Path Press will publish her next collection in 2015. Her poems can be found in print and online, in Mid-American Review, Redivider, Superstition Review, Prairie Schooner, and Rhino Poetry, and anthologized in Fire On Her Tongue: An Anthology of Contemporary Women’s Poetry (Two Sylvias Press). Currently, she edits the literary journal Crab Creek Review, and spends much time behind the lens of her cameras.