By Jennifer Savage
Every writer likes to play with form. I’m no different. Here’s a little something to switch it up a bit.
Before the snow disappeared that year,
bulldozers came. They made
flat and smooth
ditches, driveways, places where fence posts had been.
Seth took our babies for a drive,
got mired in the soft
and melting that is early spring.
I thought they were never
coming home,
but they did.
As the valley turned from brown to
blinding green earthmovers scooped up mouthful
after mouthful making mountains and valleys
where there had only been a crumbling road.
The pounding in my head marked time
with jack hammers, the welding of steel
as I drove to the hospital where I asked
the doctor to turn off the lights. I lay there
in a dark tunnel, the landscape outside cracked wide.
Gravel and mud conspired to make passage
impossible but ranchers were too busy irrigating to notice.
The pretense of something new and better
filled the valley with dust and uneasiness
until it nearly choked all of us who were paying attention.
Talk of lucky, Lucille’s muffled mama cries,
what could have been
wrapped itself around my little toe,
twisted around my ankles, hobbling me.
By the time the asphalt, molten and acrid,
made clean stripes across the valley I thought
the weight of it might crush me.
Bulldozers came again
when the light began to tilt toward shorter days, colder nights
filling the holes that were left.
Mats of seeds, like bandages,
met fresh slices of highway as snow fell.
Jennifer Savage is a writer and mama of Eliza and Lucille. Lately, she’s learning to be a city girl. She writes from her home in Missoula, Montana. She is also one of Mamalode’s favorite writers and you can fall in love with her too at Savagemama.com Read more of Jennifer’s mamalode articles here
Love what you read? Share it!
Email This Post
Connect with us!
GREAT writing Jennifer!