Sarah Lindsay is the author of four poetry collections, including Primate Behavior, a finalist for the 1997 National Book Award, and Debt to the Bone-Eating Snotflower (Copper Canyon Press, 2013). The recipient of the 2012 Carolyn Kizer Prize, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize, Lindsay is employed as a copyeditor at numerous publications.

Song of a Spadefoot Toad

by Sarah Lindsay

WE STAND by the patch of grass marked his.

But he is no longer subject
to the whims of this bewildering sphere,
with its sound waves, cancers, specific gravity, spring,
where we still live, where ostrich chicks
before hatching sing through the eggshell,
where filarial worms in bloodstream darkness
know when it’s night, and drift to the skin
of their host, so mosquitoes
will drink them and bear them away.
People on couch
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