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BLACK ICE
by Jeanine Stevens Shops that cater to vacationers close. If you want a post card or souvenir shot glass, check out the local CVS. The slow cadence of late Autumn, a good time to check the spatter of moth holes on wool cardigans. Ice and snow set limits on choices. A local bookseller remains open. Hardy poets stage a costume party: one dressed as Sexton curses a dog, another as Hefner, in a silk dressing gown, looks amused. Someone brings absinthe. Black ice appears on the road. A pause before the Italians arrive, blond women and dark haired men, in designer ski togs and gold jewelry, antsy to hit the slopes. Locals pack a lunch, retreat to the lake and count the bald eagles nesting. |
LEAF by Katy Brown |
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DOGWOOD IN AUTUMN
by Jane Blue The dogwood turns bronze at the edges right on schedule, that you planted years ago. You are both so steadfast. It's been a long hard summer this year. You've tended and watered the tree since it was a tiny sapling. There is a love that lasts through drought. Sycamores just stand there, dirty, ragged and tired holding out their arms for a handout of rain. Red berries hang like ornaments, food for the little birds that rush in and out. A blood moon will bloom tonight and then get eaten by the sun. But it will miraculously recover, its bronze reflecting the dogwood, which keeps deepening; full moon after equinox. Smoke, acrid in the lungs from fires in the hills no longer suffuses this valley, but reddens our sunsets. The season changes in spite of itself. The world goes on like your love, burning, smoldering . . . |
GONE TO SEED by Katy Brown |
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LOVE AND WET SOCKS
by Viola Weinberg O, that Wednesday when you knocked off early when we were so tired, so weary that we fell on the bed like the dead Side by side, garden-dirty, the both of us the soil and air both soft and warm our tired feet in their wet sox hanging over the bed toes cracking like castanets in the breeze Too tired to talk, we just laid there, awake you could hear appliances humming in the kitchen you could hear the dog and his sloppy drinking from the blue bowl, and a fly, a screen door somewhere But, neither of us raised a finger, listening instead to our beating hearts, those drums of blood We simply let love wash over us, cleanse us heal us, peel the fatigue from our lives Honeyed, loving thoughts were on our tongues all the more sweet as time passed soundlessly those minutes, so mute and beautiful are somehow younger than the rest of our bodies Cellular happiness, dwelling, abiding and deep |
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