Mud Season

We unstave the winter’s tangle. Sad tomatoes, sullen sky. We unplay the summer’s blight. Rotted on the vine, black fruit swings free of the strings that bound it. In the compost, ghost melon; in the fields(,) grotesque extruded peppers. We prod half-thawed mucky things. In the sky, starlings eddying. Tomorrow, snow again, old silence. Today, the creaking icy puller. Last night I woke to wild unfrozen prattle. Rain on the roof— a foreign liquid tongue.