Passing sod fields on the way to school
had me dreaming to fence it in with white boards,
a square of grassy pasture for my not-yet horses.
I’d play Legos with my brother in the basement
and claim all the green plates
perfect smooth fields for the plastic horses.
As an adult, I roped off my front yard
another place to turn loose my horses
to graze on a patch of green.
Now my sick horses are boxed into small dry lots,
my pasture grows green with too-sweet grass,
uncropped, uneaten.
Mary Wlodarski has published poems in Slippery Elm, Water~Stone, Texas Poetry Review, Sleet, Zoomorphic, Spry and others. She is teaching near the twin cities, and completed her MFA from Hamline University. She lives in Minnesota with her husband, two sons, three horses, and dachshund.
