Poetry
The Mobile Butcher
Always arriving at the height
of beauty. Spring purples: hyacinth, grape
and wood; crocus; Japanese iris. Daffodils
in every shade of yellow and peach. Trees
ballooning into flower: Magnolia, star
and saucer; arrays of magenta and rose –
Japanese plum, flowering cherry, their showy
cousin, the crabapple. Did I mention
a thousand shades of green?
In damp sunlight of early morning,
I pass the fence where our two cows
meet us and I ignore their devoted
gaze. Their bewitching eyes matched
only by diminutive horns. The morning
of the butcher’s arrival, I assiduously
avert my mind – shaking the thought
of him like thoughts of old trysts
immediately regretted. For days after
the mobile butcher, I cannot
enter the farmyard, despite my husband’s
careful cleanup, the cedar shavings
intended to keep dogs
out of the gore. I may live on a farm,
but today I am no farmer’s wife.
Tricia Gates Brown
Tricia Gates Brown’s poetry has appeared in Portland Review, Friends Magazine, and Mason Street Literary Review, among other publications, and her flash story Cold Wave won a Winter 2024 Pop-Up Writing Contest with Brilliant Flash Fiction. Her debut novel Wren won a 2022 Independent Publishers Award Bronze Medal. By trade, she is an editor and co-writer residing in northwestern Oregon, mainly working on projects for the National Park Service and Native tribes. For fun, she makes art. Her poetry collection Of a Certain Age is forthcoming from Fernwood Press in early 2025.