Thursday 14 November 2019


The House

                                                            by Dianna MacKinnon Henning


was woven with sweet cedar; its metal
roof pinged in the rain. A wide
field of windows, their window-boxes
pulsated with red geraniums. There

were oaks and digger pines.
There were coyotes that howled.
There was a pond wide as a lake. There
was a sense of other beings. A woman

and a man called their place Little
Clear Creek. They planted apple 
trees named for their children. Each
evening they walked to the pond. Snow

geese with black tipped wings
lifted off the water. The man held his
wife’s hand. Their eyes said they were
eternal. But houses are sometimes

astute scholars who study their people
with avid attention. He began to work late
at the office. She grew restless and remote.
When the people broke, the house, too.

The couple left separately, the pebble
path scattered. Geraniums died. Cedar
siding turned a dismal gray. Other
beings shook their heads in dismay, and

hesitated to enter the abandoned home.
But what was built into the walls’ continued,
their best moments, swells of laughter,
such as when they first met apple picking.



* * * * *

"The House" was first published in Blue Fifth Review.

Dianna MacKinnon Henning has work published in The Moth, Ireland; Sukoon, Volume 5; Mojave River Review; The New Verse News; Hawaii Pacific Review; Sequestrum; South Dakota Review; Naugatuck River Review; Lullwater Review; The Kentucky Review; Blue Fifth Review; The Main Street Rag; Clackamas Literary Review; 22 wagons by Danijela Trajković, Istok Akademia, an anthology of contemporary Anglophone poetry; California Quarterly; Poetry International and Fugue. Three-time Pushcart nominee. New work due out 2019 in New American Writing, The Kerf. Henning taught through California Poets in the Schools, received several CAC grants and taught poetry workshops through the William James Association’s Prison Arts Program. Henning’s third poetry book Cathedral of the Hand was published 2016 by Finishing Line Press.

4 comments:

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  2. What a wonderful text, congratulations on all that you are doing.
    Horoscopo Diario

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  4. Effective heartfelt narrative through the imagined sentience of everything but the people. Deftly sidesteps the obvious sentimentality of such a gloomy denouement.

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