[1]

Bulk of the stuff underfoot
Becoming the bulk of you
Stuffed with its rolled green rug
Churning that which turned sun into sugar
A patch of clover I sat sifting through
Sucking dandelion milk from its stem
Milk so named for its rare opacity
Bleeding from my woven crown
Yellow and delicious. 

[2]

I was reading Leaves of Grass
In the shadow of some beige thing
In the lawn of some desert corporation
To await her exposed interior
The unscrewing of her organ’s gasket
The agriculturalist’s hand plunging gloved
Into her process pouch, deflated
Beneath the surrounding flank
They will digest some months later. 

[3]

A treat for the guttural grinder
For the settling slosh machine
A treat to be alive and picky
A treat given by the alive and unpicky
To cherish tender alfalfa over dried
To cherish turning around in one’s room
To chew on the wheat and not the straw
To orchestrate so many ligaments
Pouring creamer thick into a single stomach.

[4]

Miraculous as eating light is eating leaf
Fibrous fermenting first and last
No body can make it for free
If flower is the concentration
Of all grass effort all root drudgery
If milk is the consummation of grass
And grass of sunlight, this stomach
Is the dream of remediation
Viewed from a scorched and barren ridge.

Jess Yuan (she/her) is a poet and architect. She is the author of Slow Render (2024), winner of the Airlie Prize, and Threshold Amnesia (2020), winner of the Yemassee Chapbook Contest. Jess has received fellowships from Kundiman and Miami Writers Institute, and her poems appear in Best New Poets, Tupelo Quarterly Review, jubilat, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere.