With open face you welcome the stranger looking for home. Built for a hound, you could be shelter for a multitude
of field mice, a nesting box for a free-ranging hen finding familiarity in your faded red sides; your door
—a wide O— a portal for groundhogs retreating from flood water, a surreptitious skunk, a homeless cat. Even enemies need shelter.
I, too, would welcome the wanderer, the alien. Like you, be a haven in the wilderness, the last safe outpost before the forest closes in.
Sherry Poff grew up in the hills of West Virginia. She now lives and writes in and around Chattanooga, Tennessee, where she interacts with a large group of students and family members. Sherry holds an MA in Writing from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and is a member of the Chattanooga Writers’ Guild. Her stories and poems have appeared recently in American Diversity Report, Stone Poetry Journal, and Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel. Sherry’s short poem “Resurrection” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.