This selection, chosen by guest editor Nic Job, is from Portals by Laura Grace Weldon (Middle Creek Publishing 2021).
The Peace of Cows
I forget to be wholeness
on this cold afternoon.
Mired in tight circles
scribed by our species’ crusade
to greed-eat the planet, I feel despair’s
thick vines root in my gut, climb
into my throat.
I remind my body
to relax into gratitude
but that door stays shut
so I open another
walk out back
where winter pastures entice our cows.
They stand complete in themselves,
stoked by inner furnaces, thick with calm.
I lie close to them on frosted grass,
face skies layered as skeins of gray wool.
The peace of cows holds me
like gravity, settles in my cells,
while something in me lifts,
trembles into light.
Laura Grace Weldon lives in a township too tiny for traffic lights where she works as a book editor, teaches writing workshops, serves as Braided Way editor, and chronically maxes out her library card. Laura was Ohio’s 2019 Poet of the Year. She is the author of three poetry collections—Portals (Middle Creek, 2021), Blackbird (Grayson Books, 2019) and Tending (Aldrich Press, 2013) as well as a handbook of alternative education titled Free Range Learning (Hohm Press, 2010). Her background includes teaching nonviolence, leading abuse survivor support groups, and writing collaborative poetry with nursing home residents.
Nic Job is a queer writer with their MFA from DePaul University and a constant curiosity for the world—cultures, places, people, and themself. They are a human who loves humans, and all of their tangled-up ordinariness. Their fiction, non-fiction, and poetry is published in Club Plum, Defunct Magazine, Spare Parts Literary, and other magazines.
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