Of Haints and Bloodroot
by Claire Rupnow
-Barbra Bretting Poetry Runner-UpPhantoms drape the pine-wood—
a forest hung with cobweb spectres
that twist and shift with the plummeting sun.
Twilight nestles quietly between the trees,
and my pace quickens; I sense the phantoms
drifting from their needled perches,
tasting the dusky air, waiting to roam
the hollers and mountains.
I used to think they were sent by the devil himself,
so when Sadie went haint-wild and broke
her pasture fences, I’d carry a wooden cross
my daddy whittled as I listened for hoofbeats
echoing on the ridge. But that didn’t keep those spectres
from riding me last Sunday, when Sadie had broken
her fences again, from guiding my hand with ghostly strings
to dig up the bloodroot that swallows the mountainside like snow,
crushing it in sweating palms, forcing it into my horse’s mouth.
I stood still and cold while her sides heaved like bellows
and frothy drool pooled and streamed from her velvety lips.
And my hands were left coated in the dark redness
that oozed from the plant’s root. Tennessee
never held me softly, and since then, that cross lies
somewhere on the mountainside and my daddy
can’t make me go to church anymore.
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