Betty Stanton
Betty Stanton is a Pushcart nominated writer who lives and works in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in various journals and collections and has been included in various anthologies. She received her MFA from The University of Texas - El Paso and holds a doctorate in Educational Leadership. She is currently on the editorial board of Ivo Review. ​​​
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ROADS HOME​
The paths we take to come home again are longer
than those same roads are away. They arc, electricity
​
lighting the sullen midnight dark, stretching out in
the dim spaces between stars. Maybe tires move
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faster, you say, when they're taking us away. When
they aren't weighed down with our failures. These
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paths drag years between us, every road leading back
to you. I left so that I could breathe into dust, form life
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like I was made of more than this dirt and the things
that lurk inside, but we settle to survive, spores landing
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in warm, wet earth. So when I feel older than the roads
we drove away on I think of you, feel something chanting
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in my veins that shifts and quakes. I believed that I was
stable, but now I don't remember when we weren't waves
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breaking on the shore. Grandfather was right when he said
things slip back into place, when you aren't looking, they shift
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and change. He said nothing breaks forever. My roots have
not been moved. He said dogs always know where home is.
WILDFIRE​
Her husband has done everything he can do
to fight, he and neighbors, their trucks mutated
into make-shift fire engines. Rough men
with the smell of pesticides on hands that now
grip the handles of buckets, the corded length
of hoses. Later they burn the ground themselves,
try to leave a wide black swath of nothing alive that
the fire wants. She watches everything burn. As a child
she learned controlled burns for a paper she wrote
in science class, delivered it in a shaking voice with
a poster of a Lodgepole Pine and a Sequoia carefully
colored behind her shoulder. She remembers
they are serotinous as she watches flames leap
over the back-burned line toward the crops she has
staked her life on, meaning they require heat
from the fire to open their cones, to release their seeds,
to save their lives. Her husband's shoulders shake.
Note: 'Roads Home' was previously published in Barren Magazine. Issue Six. 2019. 'Wildfire' was previously published in After/Ashes: A Camp Fire Anthology. A Butte College charity anthology to benefit victims of the 2018 Camp Fire. Limited run print only.