A Cow Named Maybe

after Zahra’s tweet

In the dismal ache between
Winter and Spring
I am so forgetful

The wind has always been wet anger
The streets ever slushed
The trees never not spindly fingers
Bare stretched toward slate sky

How easy sunlight slips through our sight into a too long parade of early evenings
How quickly the memory of blossoms drifts into soft hibernation
Favoring instead the cold’s white knuckled fist—
It’s always been like this

Somewhere else:
On the top of a squatty hill
A cottage beneath cotton candy sky
Peppered with gulls somehow
Always migrating and home
Above an ocean in constant lazy
High tide, lapping at fields full
Of wildflowers bursting
In infinite, chromatic yawn
Stems bent back beneath
The stumbling hooves of
A calf named Maybe who eats
Nothing but pink flowers and drinks
Nothing but pink lemonade and thinks
Nothing but little thoughts
Of simple life and simple rest

I am shoveling snow from my parent’s driveway and it sucks
But I am also watching Maybe wander
Toward cow adulthood
Nothing too particular to remember
Or to remember to forget
Knobbly knees knocking together
In a world well-suited to his stumble:
Seasonless and lovely

Timmy Sutton is a person who writes, loves his friends and family, and also sometimes eats oatmeal with peanut butter for dinner in Springfield, IL. You can find some of his stuff in Taco Bell Quarterly, The Georgetown Voice, and Bossier. You can find him on twitter @timothy_matthan.