Mirande Bissell

The Bull of Ciro Fernandes

We see something behind blood,

the red fabric fluttering,

his sex.

The dark he floats in

before a birth he won’t

reveal. No flag,

no nation of bulls,

nothing between us and the animal

but what we have hung

there. The artist

will not cover

the entire body

but leaves the beast’s coming

and his going

outside the sawdust ring

of combat.

May, the month I love

like a man’s back

and shoulders

revealed in light,

can’t reach me this time,

so I take the country roads to

travel

without relief, to have a good look at

the dirt

and what lives

just above it, almost always

the only car traveling—

and I slow to catch the eye of

the tawny calf

eager for shade

in advance of the coming

blaze,

his head pushed through the fence

boards, his buttercupped legs, his

throat uncut

like a boy’s.

Everything moves at the speed of light

The morning before the crash,

my train arrives

across from a military airport

where little planes of derring-do

loop in rising light.

In the first car, my heart hums,

porous, at the edge

of the depths.

I do not know why

I trust this voice

but I do.

The first car.

This is where the worst

of it happens.

I stand up and move back

a few cars.

That evening

through his kitchen window,

a seventh grader sees two trains

smash in the dark just south

of Silver Spring. A flash, a fire.

Smoke, and five inches of snow on

the tracks. Eight students die in the

first car.

People will tell you

there are no ghosts. No trains.

No snow. No morning.

Do not be afraid.

The Girls of the Future

What will they be named for if not

flowers downriver from us,

skunk cabbage on banks filling their thick,

purple wombs with swamp-children crushed

under the heel

of today’s girls, who tighten themselves in

plaster and canvas only to see themselves

seeing?

The girls of the future

will be exempted from disaster’s bus route,

their bones chalky like mountains. The sun

we’ve known

as gold and meat in heaven

will become their sun.

Farewell to our sun, we will say,

our grief a red giant.

The girls of the future won’t see

the final corona of our voices,

the smoke clear when their new life

slips from an old woman’s pocket and

vaults to the firmament

in song newborn groves

and serpents brighten to.