Stephanie Ford

ARMED INTRUDER DRILL

Girls, the softer season is over
and I, too, have been lazy,
only lowering myself—in the future
we’re here to hope we’ll reach—
to pull my son’s favorite weed, polygonum,
which is pink, and rather pretty, and scatters
tiny round seeds at a touch. Even here,
crouched between slim metal legs
machined by a different kind of prisoner,
I imagine I’m free to imagine the world
is mine to survive, as those crows now gather
their thousand minds, and rise,
a great flock of targets.

STEPHANIE FORD is the author of All Pilgrim (Four Way). Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Fence, and Tin House. She lives in Pittsburgh.