Finger Lake

Finger Lake

Kat Hayes

for Isla 

The storm gathers behind the red barns– 
it sits atop wood piles and hovers above the lake. 
Below are trenches dredged by ancient glaciations, 
ice slicing shale, ice beveling the ridges where 
I stand now in the vineyard, shivering. 

It is autumn. The baby is ill, wailing 
through the nights. I make my body a stream 
she drinks from. Frost settles in the valleys 
while the lake’s warmth suffuses 
the hillsides, sweetening the grapes. 

I remembered being twice-filled with life, 
aging my baby nine months like wine. 
Our blood pooling in the placental lake, 
villi stretching and stretching toward me, 
I fed iron and sugar to her clutch of veins. 

In the morning, the grapes will be cut from the trellises 
to be pressed and lose their skins. In time the wine 
will taste like honey, apples, wet stones. 
For now, we watch the clouds amass– 
her pale fingers cluster around mine.

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Kat Hayes
Poet & Professor

Kat is Assistant Professor of English at Eastern University near Philadelphia. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in several print and online publications including Black Lawrence Press, Ecotone, Cimarron Review, Salamander, Ruminate, Nimrod, and Off the Coast.

Photography by Marina Reich