Vulnerary
He brought me to a field
and led me to the cabin
where he was living like Thoreau.
Tufts of green laced the mud.
I stood and marveled
at the bare room
while egrets landed
like slender teeth
in the marsh,
their wingbeats
tapping out
a song: not-now.
Finely divided leaves
of yarrow surrounded
the porch. The plant’s
chief use
is to stop
the bleeding of wounds.
He was my teacher.
He wanted me
to kiss him.
I told him
what I knew
of nature:
Valerian has white
to pale lavender
flowers,
Angelica, dark
purple stems, weak leaves,
stronger roots and seeds,
that even botanists have died
from mistaking Water Hemlock
for Angelica.
Who knows why
I choked down
my dream of poison. What will heal me
still sleeps somewhere
in those woods.
Madeleine Barnes is a writer, visual artist, and Mellon Foundation Public Humanities Fellow. An English PhD candidate at The Graduate Center CUNY, she serves as Poetry Editor at Cordella Press, co-curates the Lunar Walk Poetry Series, and teaches at Brooklyn College. She is the author of Women’s Work, (Tolsun Books, 2021), You Do Not Have To Be Good (Trio House Press, 2020), Light Experiments (Porkbelly Press), and The Mark My Body Draws In Light (Finishing Line Press). She is the recipient of two Academy of American Poets Poetry Prizes, the Princeton Poetry Prize, and the Gertrude Gordon Journalism Prize, among others. Her work was featured in Frontier Poetry’s “Exceptional Poetry” series alongside poetry by former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith.
