~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Lisa Seidenberg

My Wild West

She was Daniel Boone

and I was Davy Crockett

my sister and I.

We saved four box tops for a coonskin cap

clipped from cartons of Frosted Flakes

and mailed them to Battle Creek,

world capitol of cereal boxes.

In the forest glen

we built lean-to forts with

tethered twigs and fallen branches.

Scouted trails for horse tracks

left in the underbrush.

Twenty miles to the south

lived people of the Iroquois Nation

selling tax-free cigarettes

in a forlorn shack off the highway.

Two versions of the Wild West,

almost but not quite, neighbors.

It was no more a coincidence

than the history of America itself

is a coincidence.

The invaders arrived, not on horseback

but riding John Deere back-hoes

and bull-dozers. Metal teeth

gnawed trees to pulp, leveling the land.

A neat row of houses rose

from the ground, placed

like vinyl-sided cereal boxes

on an empty table.

Lisa Seidenberg is writer and filmmaker and a Pushcart nominee (2025). Her writing has been published in Rattle, Asymptote Journal, Gyroscope Review, Rain Taxi, Third Wednesday Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, Atticus Review, The New Verse News, One Art: A Journal of Poetry, Delta Poetry Review, and New England Review; she is also a poetry reviewer for the Whale Road Review. Her documentaries and experimental films screened at international film festivals inc. Sundance, Berlin, Athens and London.