“Camp Stories” & “We were talking about our phobias—”

Poetry
Written By Nancy Carol Moody

Camp Stories

I tell you of the miles of gloaming deer—500 or more, leaping from the shoulder shrubs in magnificent arcs across the empty highway—how I slowed the car, prayed to survive that terrifying beauty. And you recount the billowclouds of mountain butterflies, the exhausting enormity of their flocking number, opaque carnage of windshield smear, the gold dust sarcophagus of your lone road home.

full buck moon
flicking mosquitos
from our arms

We were talking about our phobias—

the usual terrors involving snakes and heights
and being stalled between floors on a rickety elevator—
when one among us said

trees

and everyone just turned and gawped
as if fearing a tree

were somehow more dumb

than worrying over
a theme-park roller coaster
there would never be any requirement to ride. 

You’re afraid of trees?

No one thought to ask if they
were standing or falling.

Nancy Carol Moody

Nancy Carol Moody is the author of the collections, The House of Nobody Home and Photograph with Girls, as well as a chapbook, Mermaid. Her work has appeared in The Southern Review, Gettysburg Review, Tampa Review, and Rattle. Nancy also constructs mixed-media collages, the layering of various elements not so different from the way she builds her poems. She wouldn’t mind living on a train, but is content at home in Eugene, Oregon, with her partner and more than a thousand pens. Find Nancy online at www.nancycarolmoody.com.

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