Margaret Dornaus

Nothing More

remains of the house her father built close—too close—to the tracks. Not the wrap-around-porch where she and her sisters perched like a charm of songbirds. Not the wooden swing hung from the porch ceiling. Nor the morning glories that climbed the whitewashed columns.

Neither is there a sign of the plot her mother tended, coaxing harvests of turnips and tomatoes and okra from the red dirt clay. Nor of the chickens that ranged there, beloved as the most beloved, until they were called one by one to grace another table. Nowhere the steady hum of her sisters’ many voices: laughing, crying, whispering, sighing their way through hardscrabble winters and white-hot Oklahoma nights.

homecoming . . .
the high lonesome sound
of a passing train