In the cornfield, I found the body of a girl
next to mine, and she was the first time I’d hidden
myself in the sweat of summer, and I’d forgotten
the where and who, questions answered by
another question, why, until we stood
to brush the dirt off our backs, unbending
our starch-stiff Peter Pan collars into the crispness
of a straighter shape.

We kept ourselves secret among the ears
of corn, kept coming back to plant
new fields in place of our unidentified bodies,
picking the dresses we’d shucked off
each other from the ground.

But by harvest there were no more stalks,
and the cornfield was still called a cornfield
even though it was just an expanse of soil:
arable but empty, meaning everything
had changed but was somehow still the same,
meaning we slipped silk-like in silence back to the hiding
places of our before-bodies as if it had always been
a field of dirt between us.