Frannie Lindsay

The Good World
February 23, 2017 Lindsay Frannie

The Good World

 

but when I painted the deer
I didn’t want to scare her

so I started with the leaves
her slow tongue curled around

then the nearby apples come loose
on their brittling stems

for her alone

I painted even the halfheartedness
of that red then

her’s eyes closing, leaving the sun
to tire by itself

as her lips rolled wetly across
their amiable consonant of eating

then I stopped
for it was her long day’s end

but some apple still glistened

on the tip of my brush

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.