Roman Romeos

A sun-bleached barnyard idyll detonates into delirious antiquity when a bookish farm girl, drowsy over dog-eared pages of Livy, plummets through the trapdoor of reverie and lands in a papier-mâché Colosseum where her overall-clad suitors—Lee Moran’s gap-toothed trickster, Eddie Lyons’s moon-eyed dreamer—morph into sandal-shod gladiators. The threshing floor becomes arena; the prize, her own pulse. Lions pad in from the wheat, their manes combed like sheaves; the boys duel with hayforks reimagined as tridents while she, draped in gunnysack silk, presides like a corn-kernel Cleopatra. Each wound bleeds molasses, each kiss tastes of dust. When the church bell clangs at dawn she snaps awake, book sliding from her lap, yet the stalks outside still sway as though something large and golden paced between them.