by Telaina Eriksen

Frisky was our Isaac, born of our Sarah. We’d given up all hope that Lady might ever give us a filly. And Frisky was the sweetest thing, all dappled and joyous. She thought she was a dog, or maybe a person, since she got constant attention from us seven kids. She would sit in the porch swing with Mom and Dad and Cousin Paul said, “That pony don’t need no halter or bridle, she needs a collar ‘cause she’s nothing but a pet.”

The worst part wasn’t her death from pesticide poisoning when she was five months old—the neighbors crop-dusted the soy beans in the next field over, you see. The worst part was when Daddy loaded her in the back of the pick-up truck and then pushed her down a hill to lay there amongst the abandoned refrigerators and old tires. Daddy said dead was dead and there wasn’t any sense in digging a grave for something that big.

Telaina Eriksen’s work has been published in Heartlands Magazine, Two Hawks Quarterly, and an essay of hers was a finalist in the half-yearly Memoirs Ink contest. She has been published in numerous other places that have gone out of business (she has a knack for that). Recently three of her poems were picked up for the upcoming book The Neuropsychiatry of Poetry edited by Richard Patel, M.D. Two CNF pieces are slated to come out this fall in Audemus, a publication of Mt. St. Mary’s College. She is on the Community Advisory Board for the Michigan State University Center for Poetry and holds a B.A. in journalism from Michigan State University. She is also the co-founder of the East Lansing Writers’ Group. She doesn’t like to be dizzy and women enjoy scaring her with their menopause stories.