The Woman Who Visited Her Cornfield

The Woman Who Visited Her Cornfield

for Cindy Veach

I lay in bed too long into the morning, scrolling my phone

to find out who squeezed the last bit of joy into the jelly-jar tumbler,

the one with cartoons frosted all over it. One time, prone, I dropped

my phone right onto my mouth, thought I chipped a tooth, a front one,

one of my fangs. My teeth are still good, hard and whole, but my jaw

and its hinges are growing tired, letting loose the roots. My friend texted

an article about a python who ate a woman whole in a cornfield. At night,

her family called her name, searched row after row, and found her shoes,

her flashlight, her machete: things a snake wouldn’t need to take. They found

the snake sleeping and lidless, the shape of a humped woman halfway

down its length: the digestive juices had not begun their long work

of eating at her soft parts. They slit the snake, mouth to tail, the white

Jacob’s ladder belly opened in a single line, and the woman fell out:

complete and suffocated as a stillbirth.

One Year After My Friend Posted a Photo of Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Bacchante: Head of a Woman With the Horns of a Ram

a woman crawls through a hole behind her medicine cabinet,

finds an unused apartment: walls skimmed smooth,

doors hung, shelves for cups, hooks to hang

spider plants and lunaria in macramé slings

knotted with undyed cotton yarn. She could put a baby

grand piano in this living room. She could have two

living rooms! She posts this discovery to her TikTok

and the video goes viral in a single day, this dream

I’ve had my whole life. In the dream dictionary—the one

with a creepy-eyed sun and crescent moons against

a blue nighttime sky—it says: dreaming you’ve found

that hidden or secret room suggests new strengths,

new roles. When I woke next day, I was sprouting thick horns

like a ram. They were curling back into me.

 

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Art Information

• “Looking out of the Cave” and “How to Really Finger” © Carolin Wood; used by permission.