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  • Corral
  • Wendy Drexler (bio)

Somewhere my father had anotherwhole family I didn't know,a wife I didn't know,

hardly ever saw. One son and a younger son.Somewhere he lived with all of themin a house. I went to that house once.

It was brick, maybe, a lawn, some trees,living happily ever after.I lived with my mother.

My father came for me on weekends.Once he told me a secret about this family.One of his sons wasn't his real son.

He said no one else knew.Perhaps he told me this to make me feelspecial, because I was his favorite child,

his only daughter.I liked keeping his secret,he'd trusted me with it.

I guarded it desperately.It charged around inside melike a herd of horses galloping [End Page 173]

across a vast bare plain.To keep them safe, I mademyself a corral, and every time

I saw my father I worethe red cowgirl bootshe'd bought for me. [End Page 174]

Wendy Drexler

Wendy Drexler's third poetry collection, Before There Was Before, was published by Iris Press in 2017. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Barrow Street, Nimrod, Salamander, Mid-American Review, Hudson Review, Three-penny Review, and Valparaiso Poetry Review, among others. She's the poet in residence at New Mission High School in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, and programming cochair of the New England Poetry Club.

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