Devotional

Abstract

Devotional Colby Cotton (bio) Somewhere You must be piecing together foxes:they walk now the corridorsof corn and come begging feeders for something to eat. I was cutting lights on as You passed through the ridgetrees. Leapt chicken wire. Burrowed chain linkfences. Somewhere You must be piecing together copses, or draining the mule of blood,who chewed along the ridge trees.Somehow You must already know how I have come to this: chambering a roundon the rocks. Stripping my shirt at the streams.I have been as silent as an orchard, burning. Filching chickens from the yard,leveling my rifle in the wheatfor what? I walk down to the river each night, and know somewhere You must bewaiting. When death comes, I hope the land spitsback my casket like cud, and I hover over foxes like a crow. I will hold the bird to the lightfor You. Come, Lord, I am open. I call— [End Page 137] Colby Cotton Colby Cotton is a 2018-2020 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and lives in Oakland, CA. Copyright © 2019 Pleiades and Pleiades Press