Elaine Sexton
Death of an Iowa Farmer
We stared at the farmer laid out
in an open casket, her face
blue, a shade even the undertaker
had never seen and could not
quell. Blue as the light blue veins
in her wrists, blue as the faint sky
falling over the tractor that trapped her
body, her soul already pressed into pigment.
Elaine Sexton is the author of two collections of poetry, Sleuth and Causeway, both with New Issues. Her poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in American Poetry Review, Art in America, Poetry, the Lambda Book Report, O! the Oprah magazine and elsewhere.