Amanda Hawkins
Something about a boy who dies
just after his fourth birthday, his brain ravaged
like land cleared of itself, trees
broken off and pulled like teeth,
like land left bare after such
intensive agriculture
nothing of what once lived could live
there again. Of course the difference is
the sweet boy died
and we could hold his lifeless
body in our arms, and he could cry
from confusion and fear
when the doctors strapped him down
that last time to begin
the tests. Of course the real
difference is he was a body not a place,
though, if you ask his mother she would say he was
his own landscape.