Bad Neighbors

by Elisabeth Horan

Frost might think we have forgotten
how it is to mend a wall.
Good neighbors we are not.

What once was rolling acres of
deforested masterpieces,
framed by such precise and plaintive cairns –
rolled by hand of man or brutish ox to the edges of the gently wooded glens –

To keep the sheep so neatly grazing
for to make our woolen warming wares –
at the grist mill down yonder
at the center of town.

Children wove and spun, wove and spun,
with lanolin drenched fingers;
ewe’s coats into
farmers’ pants and ladies’ shawls
late into the northern evenings.

These children now
make imaginary pants to place on
imaginary characters, woven from
pixels and broadband –

That dance around in their brains,
late into the nights,
stressed and angsty from
the burden of bitcoin,
in their not-of-wool imaginary pockets –

Their fingers stained with heavy metals:
like toxic tantalum –
dug from mines in Africa
by children: pocketless, gloveless
who’ve no wifi friends nor Soda Crush –
but maybe rocks for fences.

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Elisabeth Horan is a poet mother student lover of kind people and animals, homesteading in Vermont with her tolerant partner and two young sons. She hopes the earth can withstand us and that humans may learn to be more kind to each other and to Mother Nature.

She has work out or upcoming at formercactus, Writers Resist, The Cerurove and Mohave Heart. Her chapbook “Pensacola Girls” is available for preorder from Bone & Ink Press.

Elisabeth is a 2018 MFA Candidate at Lindenwood University and teaches at River Valley Community College in New Hampshire.

Follow her @ehoranpoet / ehoranpoet.com

(And don’t miss Elisabeth’s poems The Hemlocks Have No Doors and Elephants Never Let Their Loved Ones Die Alone. – Elephants Never)