Will Carpenter
The cornfield across Lower Marlboro Road is growing
a house with six bedrooms, a new-barn-red
shed, and some exotic grass that shouldn’t quite
sprout in these parts. I wonder how
the new spa down the road could spare
the clay, and whether the nail parlor is jealous
of the manicured lawn. The seller has gone
to Florida, made decades of cash and broken
camp—local corn isn’t what it used to be.
On our side of the road, a bungalow hold-out,
blowup plastic pool and rust-rotten oil drum
in the backyard, nudges the fourth green
of a pasture-turned-airfield-turned golf course.
The owner still keeps goats to trim the rough
and we round them up when they escape. He’s like us –
moved here a few years ago from God-knows-where.