I waste hours of my life wishing I lived near a barn

When the red nag snapped her trotter
and couldn’t plow, and couldn’t run,
Mother took her by the creek
and we had meat each night for months (it was filling but it reeked.)

This left the barn a skeleton
with the yellow relic smell (and rust)
We nailed horseshoes up to keep the devil out,
but forgot about the ghosts (one got in and wouldn’t hush.)

He upset the bales when it suited him
and let the pitchfork bite and clang,
and howled for the Beauchamps’ girl, and the Harrisons’,
and we told him to shut his damn noise (he kept asking us their names.)

It wasn’t long before he left the barn,
and tried to settle in our shed
So we nailed crosses on our doors, and on the headboards of our beds
Across the mantel, around the pantry, and right above the kitchen sink.
Twice along our Mother’s windows (til our hands were raw and pink.)

He boiled and frothed and stripped our shutters,
and flung them at the door,
And spiderwebbed the windows with blue bricks and gardenstones
and crippled the gate, and stripped the field, and spooked the cattle out
And the tools were thrown and the shingles torn and all the time he bayed and moaned
to please, please let him in - that he didn’t mean us harm,
but we were turning him to skin and bone, trying to keep him in the barn.


(I have two settings: prose, and prose crumbled up into stanzas.)