SMALL WOODEN COW, BUCKLE UP | Kevin Latimer

With a line after Matthea Harvey 

There’s a house on my palm. it sways with the wind. in our basement, my parents store records in an old crate. they sit reminiscing while the house rocks. They are holding hands & the giant ladybug knocking on my door makes me very upset. alive today for the first afternoon in a year. i get drunk & spin around in circles on the couch. When i wake up, i’m stumbling along some town & the street smells so good & i think i’m going the wrong way, but that’s not the half of it. i ask the farmer is that your cow? & when he goes to speak, confetti falls from his mouth & the calf, grazing on yellow tulips, daffodils, ladybugs, & moss growls & spits out planet mars on my forehead. This is a big farm. Really really Big farm. I spend my night helping the farmer plant bikes in the ground. For payment, he gives me a cow & sends me on my way. Later, we stop to camp for the night. next to the fire, i hold my new cow & weep.

Kevin Latimer is a poet and playwright. His poems can be found in Ninth Letter, jubilat, Poetry Northwest, Passages North, & elsewhere. His plays have been produced by convergence-continuum. Along with Brendan Joyce he co-organizes GRIEVELAND, a poetry project. He has won scholarships, fellowships, & awards from The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland State University, The Juniper Summer Writing Institute, & Twelve Literary Arts. He is the author of ZOETROPE (2020). He lives in Cleveland, Ohio.