less buoyant

Charles Rafferty

Yesterday, the meadow was full of daisies and black-eyed Susans. It felt like a million small

balloons were lifting it into view. Now they are baling it into tidy blocks the horses will eat all

winter, ingesting a field that floated where now we see only tracks. This is always the case. The

moon shows up like a cigarette hole, and the weather keeps milling our mountains into sand.

Charles Rafferty’s most recentcollections of poem is The Smoke of Horses (BOA Editions, 2017). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, O, Oprah Magazine, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, and Ploughshares. New prose poems are forthcoming in The Gettysburg Review, The Cincinnati Review, Gargoyle, Salamander, and Plume. His Twitter handle is: @CRaffertyWriter.