Hobble Creek Review
Hobble Creek Review
Mary Biddinger
If She Had Never Left Oscoda

There are children.
She turns the rocking chair
to the wall when nobody’s looking,
stands in the yard in complete darkness
to feel closer to moss. A horse
named Locust hovers in the stalls,
knowing little of what stretches
past the split-rails. The saddle: Western.
One day she raises the stirrups high
enough for bent knees, tucks a Colt
New Frontier between her jacket and back.
Fields oscillate with rudbeckia and phlox.
Somewhere a pot boils over and fills
the burner well with fizz
and the scent of hot rubber.
Her boy hacks his way
through the street and schoolyard
with a beadboard machete.  
Locust is first a tree, then a crisp beetle
shell, in her opinion. Save the plague
for Sunday, father always said.
The gun feels human.
There are moments the river stops
and the lake runs into it like a drunk
in a dim room. She counts the moths.
Her hands ache from kneading
cold ground lamb, and the girls play
with metal skewers on the back porch,
skirts missing the kerosene lamp
by inches. The postman adjusts his
cap in the front window. Maps unpin
themselves from the bedroom wall.
Mary Biddinger is the author of Prairie Fever, the editor of the Akron
Series in Poetry, and founder of Barn Owl Review.  She teaches creative
writing and literature in the NEOMFA Program at the University of Akron.
Her poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Laurel Review,
The North American Review, and Third Coast.