A Most Harmless Hour

Kimberly Ann Priest

The men are out working the fields, rolling hay into tight spirals,

then leaving them to harvest another day.

They dot the landscape like butterscotch pinwheels

I trace on the window with my finger

before walking outside to ornament my eyes

with the picturesque view.

The tractor slows into its cave under an awning. My husband

dismounts, wiping his forehead against the sweaty bare skin

of his arm. A smearing, a full bottle of water

drunk down, his body all heat.

Labor’s satisfaction starving the parts of him more animal—

less philosophic inquiry or need to muse over

an injury. The god-sent sweet exhaustion

that overcomes a soul when all its muscles have been used.

This is a most harmless hour—the tractor holding his ribcage

like a man steadying a woman worn from giving birth.

Kimberly Ann Priest is the author of Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress 2021) and the chapbooks The Optimist Shelters in Place (Harbor Editions 2022), Parrot Flower (Glass 2021), Still Life (PANK, 2020) and White Goat Black Sheep (FLP 2018). Her poetry has appeared in several literary journals including Salamander, Slipstream, Borderlands, RiverSedge, and The Berkeley Poetry Review and she is a winner of the 2019 Heartland Poetry Prize in the New Poetry from the Midwest anthology by New American Press. A former book reviewer for NewPages and intern with Sundress Publications, she is currently Assistant Professor of First-Year Writing at Michigan State University, and an associate poetry editor for the Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry and Embody reader for The Maine Review.instagram: kimberlyannpriest.poet; twitter: @kimberlyann.poet