Poetry January/February 2009 ATLANTIC MAGAZINE

In a Haystack

By Andrea Cohen

A needle must feel
deeply needled, ill-
suited to its skin,
to leave its arrow-
straight ways,
to stray
into a haystack,
to mean to lose
or find itself
in that soft
tangle, to fill
its one good eye
with the gold
filament of pasture,
to imagine
itself pillow
to the weary,
supper to bell-
necklaced goats.
A needle like that?
It would be
criminal even
to report
it missing.

Andrea Cohen’s forthcoming collection of poems is Long Division. She is the director of the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, Massachusetts.