Their house was on a dirt road
off the highway,
the children whose father sold
logs to my father.
There was no paint on those weathered boards.
The floors were bare.
Those eight children,
leaned across the supper table
to stare at me.
There was no difference
between breath and breathe.
They breathed
quick, smudged breaths
like mushrooms.
The lamp gulped for life
in a world without light
switches, without the click,
click of baseboard heat.
If they had to, I knew they could
lure a salmon into an open net,
set leg traps, wire snares,
skin a caribou down to its meat.
Carol Hobbs’s collection New-found-land, available through Main Street Rag Press, explores the beauty and risk of that island. Her poems delve into emigration and life as an outsider longing for home and a native returning. In manuscript form, this book was the winner of a New England PEN Discovery Prize. Hobbs’s recent poems look to what remains in the wake of climate crisis and global pandemic. She teaches English and creative writing in Hudson, Massachusetts. Her work appears in many publications including The Antigonish Review, Appalachian Heritage, Cider Press Review, The Fiddlehead, Lily Poetry Review, The Malahat Review, and Pendemics.
