Tag: afternoon

Sunday afternoon by Christine Potter

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Sunday afternoon

Sometimes, when you get what you want, you
find yourself ready for sleep at 4 PM, sated

on the candy of recognition and praise, too
full of everything to even think about supper.

But it’s also like being a ghost, frayed, grayed
out, about to disappear. The air is heavy with

maybe-rain and early winter smells oddly like
spring. Just go take a nap, my husband says.

But I’m hoarding that desire. I like wanting
something that’s not quite here yet, maybe

the weird, lucid dreams I’m trying to hold
off. The floral scent of rotting maple leaves.

How lonely I still get for no real reason. The
sabbath. This wide, white, impossible sky.

*

Christine Potter is the poetry editor of Eclectica Magazine. Her poems have been curated there, in ONE ART, as well as in Rattle, The McNeese Review, Glimpse, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, The After Happy Hour Review, Silly Goose Press, and other literary magazines. She is the author of the full-length collections Unforgetting and the forthcoming Why I Don’t Take Xanax® (Kelsay books)–as well as the chapbook Before the World Was on Fire (Bottlecap Press). Her time-traveling young adult novel series, The Bean Books, is on Evernight Teen.

An Afternoon of Hollow Things by Linda Mills Woolsey

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

An Afternoon of Hollow Things

Each thing cradles its own emptiness—
the feeder’s plastic cylinder drained
of seed, the tip of a branch shivering
loss as a chickadee takes flight, my heart,
circling your absence. The sky’s an erasure,
dubiously blank, the cup I clasp holds
only a brown film and air. For breath
to fill the lungs, they must be emptied.

Hours stall, empty as acorn cups, thin
as the ordinary need just to be loved.
The hollow of my heartbeat is narrow,
too—or simply shallow, condensation
on a cocktail glass, dust on the last book
we might have read together. My heart’s
not shattered, just empty as the space
between pressed lips, waiting to inhale.

*

Linda Mills Woolsey is a Western Pennsylvania native who has spent most of her life in Appalachia, north and south. She reviews poetry for Plume and Presence and reads submissions for River Heron Review. Her poems have appeared in Northern Appalachia Review, Wild Roof, The Christian Century, The Windhover, ONE ART and other journals. She lives with her husband and two companionable cats in a rural village in Allegany County, NY.

Summer Afternoon by Cindy Buchanan

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Summer Afternoon

blossoms on the red buckeye tree
droop detach fall they do this
every year and yet every year
        I am surprised by dying

already my hands miss the way
I’ve cupped upturned faces
of petals marveled how
        the bright red panicles

jutting from tall stems thrust their ruby
throats through foliage thirst
for the tongue of a bee to whisper
        honeyed promises

of splendor eternal but what if
everything clung stubborn forever
unchanged can we really cherish
        what cannot die

*

Cindy Buchanan grew up in Alaska, graduated from Gonzaga University, and lives in Seattle. Her work has been published previously in journals including Evening Street Press, Tipton Poetry Journal, Rabid Oak, The MacGuffin, Hole in the Head Review, and Chestnut Review. She is grateful to her monthly poetry groups and the community at Hugo House for their wisdom and support. Her first chapbook, Learning to Breathe, was published in 2023 by Finishing Line Press.