Portrait Of The Husband As Farmers' Market Poem by Tiffany Atkinson

The husband is a mud-on-the-boots philosophy
in old jeans, loving nothing so much as slow growth.

His thoughts are distinctively British cooperatives,
jovial stall-holders subbing each other loose change.

His chest is a trestle laid with rare meats, smelling
of the smokehouse, his belly a seed-loaf, knotted

and oddly exotic. The sex of the husband's a plump
trout, a one-off, lolling silverside-up in its shine

for a wife with the eye of a magpie. His heart,
apparently a leafy crop, is a loom of many rhizomes

reaching furlongs - who knows how far? The husband
is mineral-rich, irregular, leaving scraps of himself

all over the street for starlings to pocket. Is a crowd
of bright skins in a bushel, wheels of feral cheese,

impossible brews from the ditches. Is the season's
measure, taking the weather however it turns out.