Northbounder

Vincent Hostak

January 12, 2022

I could instead have called you “Magnet”

the way you pull northward on the leash

drawn like a lodestone to mineral hills. 

Aside your soggy siblings in a womb

rolling in a van heaving hillward,

Bounders traveling in September’s steam

on Gulf coast roads strung across bayous,

the pine-tacked pass above dry Raton,

‘til your paws scrape these landlocked headlands

rushing upward like the Iron Springs.

Your frame held up by stiff hind legs,

you portray a loiterer’s pose

before coaxing the hinges to fall 

a force to which you are dutifully tuned

much more to you than the leash provokes.

In the air a whirring, currents crackling

where you rest beneath the power lines

and steady your busy eyes to snare

the distant drifting of two-legged ones 

discharging southward from their homes.

They’re dragged up around you in the tow,

a schoolhouse pull they’d sooner ignore.

Sleepy things, they stumble up the grade,

ranks funneling toward hissing buses

as each abandons the frosty air.

Grinding, flowing, wheeling, sometimes even sitting still

or anchored to the wintering grass upon a buzzing hill,

all recall a motor-driven nature installed years ago.

Vincent Hostak is a writer and media producer from Texas now living near the Front Range of Colorado south of Denver. His recently published poems are found in the journals Sonder Midwest and the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas and as a contributor to the TPA. He writes & produces the podcast: Crossings-the Refugee Experience in America.