Forty-eight frigid hours in a row lambs fall bloody into wet fog and snow, twins, triplets, fast one on another—a hundred ewes bleating, mounds of afterbirth, earth churned to mud, dogs nervous and circling— coyotes are out there, silent, waiting— and how quick we must be to sort out the dead, skin them to cover with sad bloody shirts the rejects whose mothers nosed them away—we shove the imposters towards grieving ewes, crooning, here, here, here's your sweet one—our jeans frozen dark and wet to our thighs and our hands red ice and the tired sheep tonguing wet lumps of wool till they wobble and stand to nurse.
B.J. Buckley is a Montana poet and writer who has taught in Arts-in-Schools/Communities programs throughout the West and Midwest for over four decades. She has recent or forthcoming work in Sugar House Review, Whitefish Review, ellipsis, and Calyx. Her most recent book is Corvidae: Poems of Ravens, Crows, and Magpies (Lummox Press, 2014).
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