Poetry by Vivian Bruce
Art by Paula Mohar
My cheeks brush the cloth baubles
that warn against the squatness of the door
to my Oma and Opa’s cabin.
I crept into the shelter like the rabbits
whose footprints we slid past
under snow-dolloped fir and lodgepole
pine. The sputtering Christmas candles
dance in my Earl Gray. Once, we stayed overnight,
star-spattered sky stretching
above the cabin roof. The stove didn’t spark,
so we ate cold sandwiches
and gasped when the white beam of my flashlight
spotlit the nibbling silver mouse
that poked up
behind the floral print benches.
We didn’t mind him staying awhile.
My Oma and Opa traded steady German bureaucracy
to be cowboys
on twisting
backcountry
trails.
When a horse steps on the tiny-leafed undergrowth,
it compresses downwards and creates
an absence:
a shape of its own. Yet, it’s all
still there.
A stranger calls that cabin home now.
They simply moved in.
Since I left balsam root for a cherry blossom campus,
unless I’m visiting,
no one lives in my childhood room.