Abby Manzella
__________
Photos by Abby Manzella
__________
At a Highway Seventy-Five
fields blur after harvest
corn is scythed
hay bales sag
Stop. Thoreau yourself
with a pause and a pace.
Take in the fading light.
Dried grass and setting sun
speak of endings and death
or nature appreciation.
The choice is yours.
__________
Between the Rows of Corn
The gaps between the cornstalk rows
should make me ponder autumn
and costumes and tossing dried kernels as a
“tricking” prank full of tinny laughter and play,
but jubilant children are not
the apparitions in my mind.
No, the children I see
are the murderous kind,
emerging from the corn.
The King of horror is the one with tricks.
__________
Abby Manzella, a 2025 Pushcart Prize winner, is the author of Migrating Fictions: Gender, Race, and Citizenship in U.S. Internal Displacements, winner of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers Book Award. Her collection Ripples into the Wild is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. She has published with The Threepenny Review, Massachusetts Review, and Pleiades. Find her on Instagram @abbymanzella and @abbymanzella.bsky.social.
__________
To learn more about submitting your work to Boudin or applying to McNeese State University’s Creative Writing MFA program, please visit Submissions for details.
Posted in When in Rome: Nov '25 and tagged in #boudin, #poetry, Poetry