Three Pieces

Maddie Downie

Bull rider J.B. Mauney Broke his Neck on Arctic Assassin, But There’s no Hard Feelings*

There’s something to the dust

the dry and soft

ripe with the stench 

of another bull’s musk.

It clouds when you step in it—

sirocco when you buck in it.

Stifles what feels like the last of your breath

still wet in your nostrils.

Have you ever thrown your head

at the sky, lung-stricken and scared,

to only see the way light carries dust in rows

between the slats in the roof?

Oh—

how it takes

the snapping of vertebrae 

to at last earn sunshine and air.

*The title of this poem is borrowed from a YouTube video with the same name.

Unborning in Blue

I see it now— the splitting of her consecrated white. I’m on all fours and can feel the wet cold of her body relent under my warm. She moans, gasps, hollow cries in what’s left of the deep of her chest— the sound of her longing, the sound of her smaller than she was yesterday. I see it now and cannot look away— the raw blue of her womb: Down down into a phthalo I can’t muster. The edge of her stretch mark is beading ice where my fingers cannot refrain. I see it now— the fertile swell she’s lost to the rivers and ocean and all her winter yearning to be full once again. And how can I stand now and leave? How can I look a mother straight in her abandoned and turn the other way? I feel it now— the fetal pull of my knees to my chest, my finger releasing from the edge of her flesh and wrapping the damp of my shins, my shoulders curling, tucking into my feeble chest— and then the drop— my unborning into her blue.

The Oldest Earthworm in the World

Let it rejoice in the flesh of an overripe tomato 

you pulled from your garden too late.

Let it swaddle itself inside the saccharine slime

of morning-abandoned banana peels.

Let it swell, brim with trimmed fat from the Christmas ham,

all white and rich and supple. 

Let it know you. Let it remember the touch of your footsteps

approaching its dirt pile in waning light.

Let it wretch itself to the surface, toss its head at the sun

crying out for the eggshells or potato skins or chicken bones you bring it.


After, let it rest, pull the contents of its stomach through its length

cupped in your hands.

Let it heed the trenches of your palm and feel its grip and release,

grip and release. 

And let you one day lay down at the dirt pile’s edge

and breathe, lastly, into the worm’s boring of your withered skin. 

Let it writhe into your fat and muscle, let it unravel your 

ancient sinew, worm-whisker your tired nerves. 

And let yourself release your knees from your chest at last 

and sink into the terminal sigh.

And hallow yourself into the years you surrender to the worm.

All your flesh and bone and matter.

Maddie Downie is based out of Bellingham, WA. She enjoys counting Pikas in talus fields and peering into crevasses; she doesn't enjoy selling her soul to capitalism to buy baby carrots and pre-sliced bread. Her work is featured in small publications such as Plainsongs and Five on the Fifth.