Ars Poetica

Natalie homer

Inside the red-brick farmhouse
there’s a model of the red-brick farmhouse
on a shelf, a copy of itself in miniature—
not unlike the white dollhouse
in the window of a home I drive past
that could itself be a dollhouse,
hinged to open and reveal cutaway rooms,
quaint furniture, floral wallpaper.

I’m not the type to skip ahead
but let’s, for a moment, do.
I imagine the deer on the roadside
seconds before my headlights make them real.
It is winter in case you wondered.
I keep wanting to picture tulips, myself,
striped and bright but in the time and space of the poem
they are in the frozen ground, biding their time.

What do tulips or deer have to do
with dollhouses and farmhouses? Nothing much.
Pretty things beget pretty things
and then a secret is divulged,
let’s say about what happened in the cabin’s loft
concurrent with the coyotes’ howls in the distance.
If there’s a lesson they can teach you, it’s this:
you must hold back, a little.

Natalie Homer is the author of Under the Broom Tree (Autumn House Press). Her recent poetry has been published in Puerto del Sol, American Literary Review, Four Way Review, Ruminate, Sou’wester, and others. She received an MFA from West Virginia University and lives in southwestern Pennsylvania.