Frannie Lindsay

The Barn
December 14, 2015 Lindsay Frannie

The Barn

 

No one just Mary

whose dreams are unspecial as pigeons

and who never went to school

keeping the secret in her own mud heart

safe there in her handmade heart

after the huge neutral wingedness

scatters the hay and flurries up

all the hay-colored moths after

each of her fingers blossoms from trembling

though she wishes it wouldn’t

though she wishes she could go back

to her sad easy chores

to the ache in her shoulders

she cannot get rid of

and that she could ignore

the summoning in response to her

summoning

Frannie Lindsay’s sixth volume of poetry, The Snow’s Wife was published by Cavankerry Press as part of their Notable Voices Series. Her other titles are If Mercy and Mayweed (The Word Works); Our Vanishing (Red Hen Press); Lamb (Perugia); and Where She Always Was (Utah State University Press). She has held residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Millay Colony. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, and many others, as well as The Best American Poetry and The Plume Anthology of Poetry. She is a past winner of the Missouri Review Prize.