Eclogue with Grappling Hook

I can feel myself slipping again, as always when I’m given too much room for thinking.

Better to be thoroughly exhausted than at full capacity.

I need to be worked like a horse, I need someone to own me and trot me around on a leash.

I am full this way. Little Queen, mouth

brimming with oil. Bluebell.

Born gentle. Limbs, basin, breasts. Still God ate

at the soft body, God made ready for use.

I have had terrible dreams and treated them as reality,

that is how much I trust my own mind.

Made my game of woman behind a fence/horses eating grass. Around & around in a ring of dirt, harvest the field with my teeth.

I have eaten my way through the garden of Eden,

am stuffed as a pig on the spit.

What good is freedom if you are going to sit there as if you were not free?

Look—people going around like animals. Soft, good, glowing.

Come closer now to this small pasture and eat.

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CAROLYN OROSZ lives and writes in Northern California. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Gulf Coast, Sixth Finch, Nashville Review, Poetry Northwest, New South, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. She is a poetry reader for the Adroit Journal.