February 2021
Maryann Hurtt
mhurttds@excel.net
Bio Note: I live between the Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin Library and the Ice Age Trail where I write, hike, bike, snowshoe, and read. As a retired hospice nurse my chapbook, River, celebrates resiliency in hard times. Once Upon a Tar Creek: Mining for Voices, a hybrid collection of poetry, history, and environmental issues is forthcoming in 2021. The water in Tar Creek is orange.

Just a Trace

mucky wetland snow
allows passage
this dead of winter
way too cold day
valentine prints lead to
white pine shelter
their brave green needles
heavy with cones and snow
they hold secrets
maybe shared in spring
but the tracks
whose eyes are watching?

silence is seeing

Mom, Do Pigs Like the Smell of Bacon?

surely she thought
her heart would break
how a mother's love knows
the pain of losing
what she holds deep inside
how every day
he takes another breath from her
and the ache of sweet little boy smell
becomes olfactory drops
of memory
and how they scream
fierce devotion
to a creature
whose future she cannot
start to fathom
but today she trembles her answer
of course they love the smell
it is what they are
we never know what we will become
but always the love
always the smell
©2021 Maryann Hurtt
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