August Ghazal
Corn is universal,
so like a Roman senator.
—Ruth Stone
County fairs: 4-H barns of piglets and paper boats of roasted butter-slathered corn.
At dinner, my mother offers a choice: large kernels or small on our cob of corn.
Abundance: fields and fields of young girls dancing—
country roads between acres of waving tasseled corn.
What makes me feel old? Not ten for a dollar,
but more than a dollar for a single ear of corn.
My daughter rolls her eyes when her aunt and I show up
with our haul from the market—watermelon and a dozen ears of corn.
Corn Mother, Demeter, Grandmother Selu—beloved matriarchs
who brought us this golden goodness we call corn.
Michael Pollan was the first to teach me this lesson:
we are not the cultivators—we are cultivated by corn
Solstice
–after Carlos De Andrade’s “Corona” (tr. by Elizabeth Bishop)
Early summer eats all the green, leaving
scattered windfall, leaving strawberries
picked clean, leaving wild fires too close.
Time is different now, more baked in and
mutable at the same time. Energy,
too, starts strong, fades by mid-afternoon.
During the day, we love each other by
chopping vegetables and heating water.
We sleep restlessly then burrow like small
mammals when morning light breaks. I wake,
unbroken, to a day so cool autumn lurks,
blooming summer days already too short.
We stand as if on a train, watching
green flash through the open window.
Suzy Harris lives in Portland, Oregon. Her poems have appeared in Calyx, Clackamas Literary Review, Switchgrass Review and Williwaw Journal among other journals and anthologies. Her poetry chapbook Listening in the Dark, about living with hearing loss and learning to hear again with cochlear implants, was published by The Poetry Box in 2023. Born and raised in Indiana, she was an Oregon special education attorney for many years and is happy to call the Pacific Northwest home. She enjoys making soup, walking among big trees, and watercolor journaling.
