Julia Shipley – Two Eggs

Two Eggs

This one the color

of my shoulder in winter,

and this one, my shoulder in summer.

No seam no pock no

porthole, smooth as oil.

The surface curve:

just a tip and a buttock,

silent as a horn in the trunk,

how many times can we give

what’s formed inside us—

never? Always? Once?

JULIA SHIPLEY lives on a six-acre farm in Northern Vermont. Her chapbook Herd won the Sheltering Pines Press Award. Her series of vignettes, Coming into the Barn: Bales of Prose about a Small Dairy Farm received the Ralph Nading Hill Award. With a Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council she is completing a book of stories and essays about small-scale farming.