What It Sounded Like on The Way to Calvary
after Bruegel
Sparrows bathing in puddles
As the sun passes behind a cloud
The scrape when the wheel heaves
On its wooden pin
Slough brimming
Gold roof of water, plash of bare feet
Her blue shift hitched up
Baby sister milking their mother, jaw pulsing
These small things changed her
Meat-birds on the scaffold
A woman turning her back
A woman sobbing into her apron
Brick-red earth
Marsha de la O’s latest book Every Ravening Thing (Pitt Poetry Series) came out in Spring 2019. Her previous book, Antidote for Night, won the 2015 Isabella Gardner Award (BOA Editions). Her first book, Black Hope, won the New Issues Press Poetry Prize. De la O has published extensively in journals, including two recent poems in The New Yorker, as well as poems in Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Barrow Street, Third Coast, and North American Review. She lives in Ventura, California, with her husband, Phil Taggart. Together, they produce poetry events and edit the literary journal Spillway.
