Julia Cohen & Mathias Svalina


          
                 









Only So Much Fits in a Petri Dish


Simple-headed woodshed, carrot patched & veiny.
Full of sleep that tastes like cakes, sleep the color
of my former sin. I've hidden hushes along the dry side
 
of the roof, glued tin to my underchin. Chimes remind
me. And remind me. Baby hair mossing the garden,
I enter the wood shed & its dark-scent of the littlest
 
child learning how to spin a wolftail of her own hair.
The child is safe, caked in moss below the sin
that dried the shed. Dried sleep into an eyelid.
 
I've seen more veins than I can count. I've held
the mother's jawbone in my hands while overturning
a cornfield. No history to a garden a name could recall.
 
When the tree climbs down its bark, I follow
seedlings buried in cake. I've hidden the sin in roofing,
de-veined by a plum falling from the child's hand.
 
A wolf of her own. A cake of moss, dirt-chimed. 
A cornfield curdled below another cornfield,
the one on top, on fire. The burning shed,
the last child with a tail.
past simple home