Judith Waller Carroll grew up in Montana, spent thirty years in the San Francisco Bay Area, sixteen years in the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas, and currently lives in Oregon— locales that inspire her work.

Carroll is the author of What You Saw and Still Remember, a runner-up for the 2017 Main Street Rag Poetry Award, The Consolation of Roses, winner of the 2015 Astounding Beauty Ruffian Press Poetry Prize, and Walking in Early September (Finishing Line Press, 2012). Her poems have been read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac, published in numerous journals and anthologies, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

She is retired from a career in public relations and fundraising.

Landscape, with Horses

Even from this distance of miles and time
I can see the slight rise of the hill
that signaled the turn to the rutted road,
swirling with tumbleweeds and dust,
where my grandfather steered his Jeep
past the grandstand, the chutes, to the sun-bleached
corrals where the whinnying horses waited.
I watched from the fence while he filled
long troughs with water from a spigot.
In summer, some of these corrals housed the broncs
that tested the toughest cowboys,
but these were local horses boarded year-round
and cared for by my grandfather
who chuckled and cooed as he pitchforked hay,
the way he talked to Buster, his ten-year-old terrier
who rode between us as we bucked and bounced
back to the highway, crossed the covered bridge
over the river that eddied through cattails
and cottonwoods, passed the Bar K campground
with the old log cabin, and ended up on Main Street
with its sandstone buildings that housed the bank,
the post office, and the Atlas Bar.
Around the corner and a few blocks over
my mother was humming along to the radio,
doing the crossword in the morning’s Gazette.
Glad to have a few hours to herself.

My Mother Fixing Supper

Every night at suppertime, my mother sang.
Clues to what she was cooking were sprinkled like salt.
Cry Me a River she’d croon as she sliced
onions, slid them into bubbling butter,
We’re in the Money if she’d splurged on steak.
Once the food was on the table and my father seated,
she was all business—napkins on laps
and mind your manners—but while it was cooking
our kitchen was as raucous as a dance hall,
my sister and I twirling past each other
as we laid out knives and forks,
steam rising around my mother’s face
as she drained the potatoes, another song
beginning as she scooped flour from a canister,
whisked it into hot grease, and still singing,
turned it into gravy.