THIS HARVEST MIGHT SUSTAIN ME FOR A YEAR

                   by Oliver Baez Bendorf 

                   for Ada and Daniel 

I am filled up with dreams from
the poppies in the empty lot next
door. Filled with nightmares
where they butcher the children.
Full up of forgetting to make this
about self love. In the apartment
with no shower curtain and no
blind on the window, I shower
on my knees, keeping one half
of myself just for me. I like
to bow my head to the minerals.
I’m filled up with dreams
where half of me is just for me,
not for the half moon peeping,
or the neighbors, or the tree.
I am filled up with prayer and
the last of the weed.
The steam speaks to me. I could
spend all night drawing
pictures on the foggy mirror,
just for me. No one would stop me.
I wouldn’t stop even if they stopped me.
Even if they stopped me, I wouldn’t stop.



Watching the river freeze,
I imagine what happens
underneath. Ice begins
on banks, constricting
flow to middle,
bends water in new
ways. I imagine this is how
an artery clogs,
or pipe corrodes, 
calcifying from
outside in. Snow falls
and the river grows
a crust of ice, refusing
witness. Life moves
beneath. Begins
translucent, then clouds.
Thick flap of owl wing.
Difficult to trust that which
is less visible, honor
the work that must
be done out of sight.



          G., I am furious. I do
want the excellent corpses
to have less. We have been
gruff with one another, fighting
over scraps. Little black dots
are the ellipses of
complicity. Trash no
longer brilliant, it’s evidence.
I hope I live a long time, I think.
Or save us from this hell.

                                   Night
is no cover. The moon and
nocturnal animals keep watch
for us, while we sleep in our
houses with our families,
and we are all burdened
with what is in our midst.
I admit, I grew complacent.
How can any of us eat
or sleep? As though it is
some kind of reward to 
live a long time in this
darkness? I am not furious
enough. My fury converts to
a livable kind of distress.

No bread. No milk. No eggs. No fish.
My insides buzz with cold science.
Ancestors arrive. Some to help.
Others to eat. I miss the pond at dusk.
I resent my appetite. I don’t understand:
if I have money, why is there nothing to buy?



Maybe the poppies are
the gods, and I am a poem
in the field. In morning,
the old man mows his
path along chain link.
Kids are crying
and dogs too.
Look at this open field—     
poppies are for the gods
like the way I love
through language.





​

photo by Cate Barry

Oliver Baez Bendorf is the author of Advantages of Being Evergreen (forthcoming 2019), winner of CSU Poetry Center's 2018 Open Book Poetry Competition, and The Spectral Wilderness (Kent State U., 2015), selected by Mark Doty for the Stan & Tom Wick Poetry Prize. Poems are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, BOMB, and Poetry. A CantoMundo fellow and the 2017-2018 Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, he currently lives in Michigan where he is an assistant professor of creative writing at Kalamazoo College. ​