Everyone Wants Some of My Prairie

Abstract

Everyone Wants Some of My Prairie Oliver Baez Bendorf (bio) Breath, unbound from desire for it.Pollen across a field. Megoing quiet for it likeowls do, the only sound at all their quiet nothing— how heavy it is. Everyone wants a ride in my combine.The streetsare numerals and “he” is taking place in a future he has.The day imparts severalvisual patterns which I understand as likenessuntil someone says “correspondences.” I likethe part where I look up and the stars don’t look back at me andthe coyotes don’t howl back and yearsof dark shapes in the corners of the field come back like wind does, likebreath that has blown through everyone. [End Page 130] Oliver Baez Bendorf Oliver Baez Bendorf is the author of Advantages of Being Evergreen (CSU Poetry Center, 2019) and The Spectral Wilderness (Kent State University, 2015). His writing has been published or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, BOMB, Kenyon Review, Poetry, and Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. Born and raised in Iowa, he has received fellowships from CantoMundo, Lambda, Vermont Studio Center, and University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Creative Writing, and is currently an assistant professor of Creative Writing at Kalamazoo College in Michigan. Copyright © 2020 Middlebury College Publications