The Loblollies

At Rabbit Hill Inn there are sometimes small events.
Usually after team losses. Or death when certain meals go south.
They’re serious, these happenings. Better to call them that. Or storms.
When thick plates cough. Tacks, hair. Little ghouls of lint lining stairs.
It’s quite dry; the paintings shrink. Which is really odd
in such a thick and verdant place.

It is odd for many reasons. Not least of which is
all the trees are soaked and bulge with frogs.
Not the least of which is rot. Not the least of which
we’ve still no lucid thought of what to call them.
The Elevator People. They come from mines.
From the hot tar of roads. Under fences and rills.

I remember when they first came here.
It was the howl of spring.

Bothy

One thing is the food- the shelf-stable, the canned- wasn’t replenished
with adequate care. There should be balance in a place like that.
A clutch at least of home. As a reward. It was dangerous there, you see.
Stone so silvery grey and green. Walls were hungry and the wind screamed.
The path there long and tricky. Near invisible. Near impossible to find.

I was scared to stay at the house myself but also scared to leave. I knew
I didn’t know what I would find in the next city, the kingdom of flags.
I didn’t have a hat, or a dog. Nothing beautiful. But people
kept coming. Just different ones came is all. And different ones
from the people who came after that.

I tried to sit with them in the evenings, to make them all new.
The voices got strange and that’s because of their necks; they thinned
and got ropey or flattened like boots. Anyone with nerves
should think about what that does. What does that do
to someone like me who’s already wrecked?

I can’t decide now what went on. In the travelers’ house.
In the keep. But when I finally had to leave I left for good.
I started a new life. I even gave it a name: Folio Days.
I haven’t mentioned what my name was for that other life
in the mountains, in that haunted place. It was Fiend.

Linda Wojtowick is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and has recently had poetry recommended for the Best of the Net Anthology. She is co-creator and writer of the podcast The Ghosts on This Road.