A Walk in the Woods between Clients

*This poem was originally written in 2018 when I was a college student for one of my poetry classes. It has been edited to be a bit more cohesive.*

Her loafers strangle crackling sighs

from fallen pine needles, her phone a

mechanical mockingbird shrieking career

career career. She stifles it like a hand fisted over beak.

.

Behind closed lids unfurl

gold-frosted days, pigtails and

bare feet, blood-roses budding

on bark-kissed knees,

.

afternoons of shaking browned

needle-bunches like maracas, laughing

at their staccato-rainstorm,

decorating mud pies with baby pine cones.

.

She remembers using broken branches

as walking sticks, as a wizard’s staff once

to beguile a hognose snake, waving ‘goodbye’

to it with a fan-frond of pine needles,

.

finding lizard eggs that would never hatch,

weeping over ant-excavated turtle shells

then taking them home to hide

in boxes under her bed.

.

Her eyes open and spy

a deer watching her, perky-eared,

its nose glistening like

sun-spotted obsidian.

.

The phone rings again.

Again. Again.