Take Five by Heidi Seaborn

Take Five

The tempo changes. Rain in late August.
Wildfire season extinguished.

As my email clutters with democratic emergencies, I play
Brubeck’s Take Five on loop like when I was seventeen
driving through green, green, green. Untarnished by sunlight.

Listen to the drum solo. An enjambment.
Off-kilter. Giddy. Like love.
Yes, let’s say its love.
Such an unstable, impromptu gesture.
The rhythm hesitating—

a syncopation, teetering.
I plant a yard sign, phone bank, donate the small change
of eighth notes. Each beat,

a brightening. Again, the brush over drum,
shuffle, shuffle over cymbal.

I’m vowing to stay alive with the man I love—
as the horn sheds its clothing on the floor.

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This poem is discussed in Heidi Seaborn’s craft essay Writing to the End: Artistic Choices in Apocalyptic Times published in Cleaver Magazine.

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Heidi Seaborn is the author of three books of poetry tic tic tic (2025), An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, Give a Girl Chaos, and three chapbooks. She’s won numerous awards including The Missouri Review Editors Prize in Poetry. Recent work in Agni, Image, Poetry Northwest, Terrain.org, The Slowdown and elsewhere. Heidi holds degrees from Stanford and NYU and is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal. heidiseabornpoet.com