Carolyne Wright


The Foreclosed McMansion on Exurban Hill

(With apologies to E. A. Robinson)


The sub-prime lenders are all gone away.
The former trophy home is dark and still,
There are no more deals in the works today.

Through boarded windows and big signs that say
Town Property, Keep Out! Foreclosure Auction will
Take place when sub-prime lenders have all gone away.

Nor is any speculator on his way
To flip this property for good or ill:
There are no more deals on this lot today.

Why then are we slinking off to Fannie Mae
To beg for a lower principal, a smaller bill?
The sub-prime lenders are all gone away.

Repackaged, bundled loans traded away—
Who holds our mortgage? Who's the shill
And who the fall guy? Who'll even deal with us today?

There is exurban blight and system-wide decay
On view at our McMansion on the Hill:
The sub-prime borrowers and lenders gone away,
Foreclosures are the only deals going down today.

photo Daniel Santos

Carolyne Wright's most recent books are Masquerade, a memoir in poetry (Lost Horse Press, 2021) and This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems (Lost Horse Press, 2017), whose title poem received a Pushcart Prize and appeared in The Best American Poetry. She has nine earlier books and chapbooks of poetry; a ground-breaking anthology, Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace (Lost Horse, 2015), which received ten Pushcart Prize nominations; and five award-winning volumes of poetry in translation from Spanish and Bengali. A Contributing Editor for the Pushcart Prizes, Carolyne lived in Chile and traveled in Brazil on a Fulbright-Hayes Grant; she returned to Brazil in 2018 for an Instituto Sacatar artist's residency in Bahia. She has received grants from the NEA, 4Culture, Seattle's Office of Arts & Culture, and she holds a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award to Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, for 2022–23.

ISSN 2472-338X
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