This week’s poem, Sonja Johanson’s “Three Deer in Oquossoc,” shows us a speaker’s moment both in transit and in a particular place. I love this poem’s distilled imagery of cold and seeming impasse, and its clarion dialogue, at once flinty and mythic.

Johanson has recent work appearing in Plume, Rhino and Sugar House Review. Her most recent chapbook is “the burgeoning world” (Glass Lyre Press). Sonja holds an MFA in poetry from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and lives in the mountains of western Maine.

Three Deer in Oquossoc
By Sonja Johanson

East will take me back. I drive
west. I wend between snowbanks,
until the road delivers me
to a sleeping boat launch.

They stand on the frozen ramp;
watch me with coats that are
better than mine. Ice houses
and snowmobiles edge the distance.
I have to turn around, I say
to them, I went the wrong
way. They stamp and chuff.
No, they tell me, this is the way.

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Three Deer in Oquossoc,” copyright 2015 by Sonja Johanson, was first published in Plume Tree Tavern. It appears by permission of the author.

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