Chaff and Grain Together

Alaska Quarterly Review, Volume 37, 1 & 2, Summer/Fall 2021

One time, in a field of ready wheat, the plow took the tails off a line of cats, mother followed by four kits, unseeable in the moving ocean of husk and seeded gold. Another day, a tractor tipped over the lip of a rise created by spring flood, the farmer’s organs crushed to the beyond. No one could detect that lip, the midsummer crop so thick its surface hid the underneath, but she’d seen it all. Things like that happened on a farm. Hard, hard. Life and its endings. So when she milked cows before dawn to relieve their need, she tied my uncle to a tree. It was possible for a two-year-old to drown in the dark waters of the coolie out there beyond the barn, and he was a wanderer that one. A rope around an ankle, she believed then, could save a person from himself.

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Oil painting “Poppies,” courtesy the artist and Amy’s friend Ann Hogle