Emily A Benton

Back Country

Where once gravel, now
double lines of yellow paint 

and asphalt glimmer with heat.
Where you were taught 

to mind No Trespassing signs
bordering Miss Hixon’s property— 

where you learned how to step over
barbed wire, over rosebush, and to crouch 

in the pines at each truck’s passing—
dozers now congregate empty plots 

surrounding a man-made lake.
You stand at the gate, stubborn, 

waiting for her horses to nudge
a wild apple free from your knuckles, 

though Miss Hixon’s long gone—
her sassafras weeded from 

the mouth of the city mower—
and what runs toward you growls 

and bites at the air, its hair raised
in fear of your foreign scent.

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Emily A Benton is a poetry editor for storySouth and a former editor for The Greensboro Review and the University of Hawai‘i Press. Her poems have appeared in journals such as ZYZZYVA, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Harpur Palate and Southern Poetry Review. Raised in Tennessee and a graduate of the MFA Writing Program at UNC Greensboro, she lived and worked in Hawai‘i from 2012 to 2020. She now resides in Georgia. Find more at emilyabenton.com