SARAH BARBER

Porcupine

I thought it slept in sun and for a quarter

mile I held my happy tongue and even

when you said you’d seen it move as dead

things do, nudged by wheels at night

back and forth across the center lines,

had watched it each day grow more fat

with glad maggots, I didn’t mind. I thought

about the resurrection of the body in which

I don’t believe except for porcupines;

they at least should come into a heaven

of super-abundant clover and bark amazed

as babies, unbarbed and mutely feeling

one another up in the soft crotch of a tree.

Sarah Barber's poems have appeared in Ninth Letter, Pleiades, New Ohio Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Crazyhorse and Poetry, among other places. Her book, The Kissing Party, was published in 2010 by the National Poetry Review Press. She teaches at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY.