The boy was sediment—
silt pressed into bone,
layers beneath his own weight,
each sense buried
deeper than sound could reach.
In the fields, cotton heads
bent their necks to August,
white surrender
stretched row by row
toward a horizon
that consumed heat whole.
He walked between the furrows,
his body a drought
even the deepest wells
could not slake.
Touch meant nothing.
Taste, a memory
of salt he never sweat.
Then storms—
not the gentle kind
that turn soil tender,
but lashes of electric wrath
splitting sky from sky,
water from water,
self from self.
Each drop struck like truth:
sudden, unforgiving.
Carving new channels
through the packed earth
of his chest.
The cotton bent but did not break.
Row after row,
they rose from their drowning,
fiber clinging to seed,
root drawing deeper
than the flood could follow.
The flooded field
becomes fertile ground,
how what breaks open
the hardpan of the heart
lets the green world
push through.
When rain falls now,
he watches it pool in the bottoms,
allowing it to speak its own wounds
he has no name for,
only the knowledge
that beneath the surface,
the earth is working.
