Maple Street, Brevard NC
With great difficulty we had located the house
renumbered by the county a while back.
The color remained the same, green
like the belly of a rhododendron leaf;
some shutters had been added.
For a mountain minute, I saw
myself at age ten, propelling the glider
with my dirty feet.
Pushing off faded slats to
the twang of the rusty springs,
Nanny rattling pans in the kitchen,
Pa-paw’s raspy cough.
We didn’t linger long. Just enough time
to notice the kitchen windows
smaller, double-paned, allowing for less
view of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
It was harder for me to peer in,
to see more.
*
Carol Parris Krauss is a mother, teacher, and poet from the Tidewater region of Virginia. In 2018, the University of Virginia Press recognized her as a Best New Poet. This Clemson University graduate has work published in numerous online and print magazines such as Louisiana Review, Dead Mule, Broadkill Review, Schuylkill Valley Review, Storysouth, Amsterdam Quarterly, Hastings College Plainsongs, and the South Carolina Review. Her first book, Just a Spit down the Road, was published by Kelsay in 2021 and she was the winner of the Eastern Writers Association Crossroads Contest.
