She dreamed
she could leave
the backwoods
for the savage
of surf, loden
becoming aqua, white-
tipped raven given
way to gull and salt.
But the gun
in its corner,
the man’s red
hands, midnight
forest, an unillumined
path from cabin
to outhouse to barn
season to season.
Some nights she
heard the moan
of sea foam take
the house, bear
her bed toward
a clutch of islands
where she could live
without a tree in sight
only wind blowing
through shingle
and lathe feeding
her like a pledge.
Susan Roberts’ poems have been most recently published in Painted Pebble, Gyroscope Review, The MacGuffin, The Bangalore Review, Dovecote Magazine, ellipsis, The RavensPerch, The Tishman Review, Salamander, The Brooklyn Quarterly, and Sharkpack Annual. She has recently retired from teaching undergraduate literature and writing at Boston College and is also on the faculty of the university’s Prison Education Program at MCI-Shirley and MCI-Framingham. She divides her time between Boston and Vermont.
THE WOODSIDE REVIEW
welcomes submissions of finely-crafted poetry and short fiction. Read our guidelines and submit your best work to:
woodsidewrites@protonmail.com
Thanks for reading THE WOODSIDE REVIEW! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work.
