KSC senior Mary Benson, of Chester, NH, has been awarded the Eder Creative Writing Scholarship, an impressive accomplishment. So impressive, in fact, that we thought we’d introduce her through three of her poems, a Newsline first. Let us – and Mary – know what you think. If you’d like to know more about her, and the scholarship, see the news story on the KSC news page.

The Day of the Ladybugs

I sweep the windowpane
and return to the Day
of the Ladybugs:

the day we scraped crab-apples
from the lawn of the old couple
who paid us two wrinkled
bucks-a-piece.

We dropped the soiled fruit
into gray wheel barrows
as you pelted my legs
and told me to keep counting,
counting black apples
like we counted the backs
dropping on our knees
crusted with blood—
deep ladybug rouge

like the rings under our father’s eyes
as he sat sun burnt on the side-porch,
smiling beneath beads of sweat,
fresh brew clenched
in his burgundy grip.

Mom soaked in a lawn chair
reading books on other
womens’ lives,
while the baby napped
in the nook of her neck,
and we barreled home with
crab-apple stains and ladybugs
laced in our damp hair.

That night I slept humid dreams
of insects roaming my eyelids.
I awoke and peered
from my window
at the vacant porch:

Dad was hitching trains
for the railroad,
mom was vacuuming houses
for pay,
the baby was hiding
beneath heaps
of laundry, and you were always gone
from your unmade bed,

and I sweep the windowpane
with my fingernail:
lifting the dirt
of dead ladybugs.

My Father Worked the Railroad

My father worked the railroad
for twenty-seven years,
tearing ticket stubs
from Boston to Pittsburgh
and back to Boston:

His ears ringing
iron whistles,
his neck chafed beneath
the ironed blue collar,
his nose curled fat
with six-bag bums.

Five nights a week my father
came home looking
like a beat boxcar:
his heavy boots scuffing
the kitchen tile,
eyes charred slate thin,
hair slicked stiff beneath
the boxy black hat

as he slouched in his
arm-chair, sifting
through the Boston Globe,
reading the printed names
of missing men,
plunging from
the splintered tracks:
disjointed and slung like
sacks of lead lunging
over the iron rails.

His voice would pipe dry
at the base of his throat:
his eyes dead on the page
like two stiff skulls
lining the rails
from Boston to Pittsburg
and back to Boston,

And the names built
in my father’s  brass throat
like burnt weeds
for twenty-seven years.

What I Remember About the Snow

Zipped fat in colored wool,
we trolled knee-deep
towards the far end of the yard–
my brother a blue rubber ball,
me a pus-red zit,
my mother’s face lit
in the kitchen window.

Stephen dug into
the ground, building
a tunnel of barren rooms
while I lay back, belly-deep
beside him—
staring into night.

Ice clogged my boots.
Cold sagged in my nose,
hung heavy on my eyelids,
burrowed in my ears
as the kitchen light
went out:

my mother’s pale face
gone from the window,
Stephen’s blue legs buried
beneath collapsed walls,
and what I remember most
about that first snow

is the swollen red sound–
the raw black burning.