Whitetail, poem by Misty Marie Rae Skaggs

I scare easy.
Like a wob­ble-kneed fawn,
greed­i­ly gob­bling down
daisy heads
that grow abundant
in the steep, blind curve
of the one lane,
grav­el way home.
You come up on me, cool
as a cucumber
made salt pickle
on a sum­mer day.
And I may meet your eye
and you may feel enchanted.
but I’ll bolt,
buddy.
Turn pale, white
tail
and bounce through
a bri­ar bramble
barefoot.
There are only two car­di­nal directions -
Away from Kentucky
And back to Kentucky.

Misty Skag­gs, 29, cur­rently resides on her Mamaw’s couch way out at the end of Bear Town Ridge Road where she is slow­ly amass­ing a library of con­tem­po­rary fic­tion under the cof­fee table and per­fect­ing her but­ter­milk bis­cuits. Her gravy, how­ever, still tastes like wall­pa­per paste. She is cur­rently tak­ing the scenic route through high­er edu­ca­tion at More­head State Uni­ver­sity and hopes to com­plete her BFA in Cre­ative Writing…eventually. Misty won the Judy Rogers Award for Fic­tion with her sto­ry “Ham­burg­ers" and has had both poet­ry and prose pub­lished in Lime­stone and Inscape lit­er­ary jour­nals. Her short series of poems enti­tled “Hill­billy Haiku" will also be fea­tured in the upcom­ing edi­tion of New Madrid. She will be read­ing from her chap­book, Pre­scrip­tion Panes, at the Appalachi­an Stud­ies Con­fer­ence in Indi­ana, Penn­syl­va­nia in March. When she isn’t writ­ing, Misty enjoys tak­ing long, woodsy walks with her three cats and watch­ing Dirty Har­ry with her nine­ty six year old great-grandmother.