Tag: Fall

Two Poems by Rachel Marie Patterson

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Stonetown Road

Sunday, black coffee and
rectangles of dishwasher soap.
We get the call at 10:30—
my mother-in-law fell hard
on the kitchen floor.
So we race two hours north
to find her in a mechanical bed,
two staples in her head,
asking every nurse to take her
for a cigarette. When I ask,
she can’t remember whether
she chewed the aspirin.
Outside the security glass,
a hawk surveys the embankment.
The night we met, I howled
with laughter as she gripped
my sleeve with a gauzy, manicured
hand. Her eyes were as clear
as the lake behind us. How
my husband gushed and beamed.
His mother used to write cards
and keep appointments, before
her pretty cursive looped away
to oblivion. In the ICU, he leans
to kiss her bloody forehead.
I know now I will watch him
lose her, slowly. Driving back,
we pass his childhood home–
the natural pool full of snakes.

*

Emergency Vet

When the dog stops blinking, I wrap
her in a towel and swerve the highway,
one palm cupping her distended bowel.
In the cement waiting room, black
coffee in a styrofoam cup. I stare
at the framed canine dental chart
while they thread the catheter and split
her open. Remember how she ate tissues
from the trash because they were mine,
wore circles into my bedroom carpet.
For 13 years, she followed me
from home to home, licking the salt
from my eyes. Now, there is nothing
to do but leave her.

*

Rachel Marie Patterson is the co-founder and editor of Radar Poetry. She holds an MFA from UNC Greensboro. Her poems appear in Cimarron Review, Harpur Palate, New Plains Review, The Journal, Thrush, Parcel Magazine, Smartish Pace, and others. The winner of an Academy of American Poets Prize, her work has also been nominated for Best New Poets and Best of the Net. Her poem “Connemara” was a Special Mention for the Pushcart Prize in 2019. She is the author of Tall Grass With Violence (FutureCycle Press, 2022).

Autumn by Laura Ann Reed

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Autumn

Beyond a window, a stone’s certain surfaces
are dark with shadow, and each of the three
white blossoms on a rhododendron stem
opens to the wind in a different direction.
From between gray clouds light shines
on a crow’s wing as I turn and turn
in October’s yellow weather.

*

Laura Ann Reed, a San Francisco Bay Area native, taught modern dance and ballet at the University of California, Berkeley before working as Leadership Development Trainer at the San Francisco headquarters of the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the United States, Canada and Britain. She is the author of the chapbook, Shadows Thrown, (Sungold Editions, 2023). Laura and her husband live in the Pacific Northwest.

Two Poems by Karen A VandenBos

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Even Loss Can Be Beautiful

Loss comes quietly.
It surprises us as we look in the mirror, turn on the news,
answer the phone, open an email, look out the window
or spin around.
What was once a forest of golden leaves has faded into a
grove of muted browns and empty cathedrals.
The pure white of snow has been stained by the mud of
spring, no longer inviting.
Some lost things are found to have taken on new shapes:
a mitten without a thumb, a feather with a broken spine,
ashes with no fire.
They ask us to see the beauty in being broken, messy. Let
them surprise you with what they have to offer.
Let once shining blue eyes, now dulled by all they have
witnessed reopen in wonder.
Loss becomes rivers accepting the melting ice, forests
resurrecting into sanctuaries of green light and new life
awakening from a long winter nap.
In the way of the seasons, there is no word for loss, only
a continuous ebb and flow, a cycle of death and rebirth
where beauty can be found in the tiniest flaws.

*

Autumn in the Rear View Mirror

Our small lives rise and fall as
another November recedes in the
rear view mirror.

It has been a season of few mercies.
Bones worn down to the marrow and
hope vanishing like smoke from an
extinguished match.

The sun’s light grows softer as
the days grow shorter and shadows
lengthen. There is a new chill in
the air.

Night drapes us in her black robe
before the chime of the evening
church bells ring a call to vespers.

The trees are bare and the north
wind carries us inside.
Inside where we sit by the fire
dreaming of things that cannot last.

*

Karen A VandenBos was born on a warm July morn in Kalamazoo, MI. She can be found unleashing her imagination in three online writing groups and her writing has been published in Lothlorien Poetry Journal, The Rye Whiskey Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Blue Heron Review and others.

Late Autumn by Elizabeth Wilson

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Late Autumn

I know your sister worries.
She thinks my illness will make

a nurse out of you,
that I have nothing

to give. It’s true
I suffer. You are certain

this will pass.

Today we take the train
north. I nudge you to look out

as rows of houses undulate
against the changing landscape.

*

Elizabeth Wilson is a tap dance enthusiast, chronic illness advocate, and Rising Voices of Narcolepsy speaker living in the North Carolina mountains. Her poems have appeared in Asheville Poetry Review, Clementine Unbound, Cold Mountain Review, and Trouvaille Review.

Two Poems by Lisa Alletson

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Fall clean-up

– the soil brown and soft as a fresh grave.
I plant Zopiclone in my rock garden
sending it to sleep for two seasons.
Press Ativan bulbs three inches deep
down the throat of a lost foxglove.
My thumbs dissolve into dust. Tucking
the rake back in the shed I add instructions
on how to breathe. Pour a cold glass of weed-killer.
Dead leaves still clinging to my ankles.

*

Corsage

My lover brings me a dandelion
on a wire stem. Pokes the sharp end
through my skin to pin it on my breast.
It slips into my body, wraps my false ribs
in its long metal roots, spilling
its milky juice in my synovial fluid.
I want to tell him it hurts to love
but puffballs fall from my mouth
spreading his greedy seed to the world
each time I exhale.

*

Lisa Alletson grew up in South Africa and the UK, and now lives in Toronto, Canada. Her writing is forthcoming/published in Crab Creek Review, New Ohio Review, Eunoia Review, Lumiere Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Flash Fiction Magazine, Sledgehammer Lit, among others. Twitter @LotusTongue

Two Poems by Kari Gunter-Seymour

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Because Autumn Always Clotheslines Me

Already the sumac—ripened,
rusty red leaves, stark among the greens.
Not yet, I say. I say it every August,
though leafy lime katydids warn me,
chameleoned against the Japanese maples,
suddenly out-singing even the cicadas.
Stink bugs feast in the garden, a melancholy
thistle bends to a rumor of breeze.

*

Power Out on the Mountain

I started out this day elbowing
my grandmother’s forget-me-not
teacup off the counter beside the sink.
Sobbed as I swept a million jagged
memories, scattered across the kitchen floor.

Now my feet up, a glass of sweet tea,
I watch birds at the feeder.
A quarrel of house sparrows peck
at the smalls, gorge themselves on seed,
as if they deserve to.

I once told my grandmother a rich man
hurt me. Her bent head told me
to keep that story to myself.
I revisit what it means to be ruined
over and over in my sleep, imagine ways
to dismember him, as if that might help
glue my own broken pieces back together.

*

Kari Gunter-Seymour’s poetry collections include A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen, winner of the 2020 Ohio Poet of the Year Award and Serving. Her poems appear in numerous journals and publications including Poem-A-Day, Verse Daily, Rattle, World Literature Today, The NY Times, and on her website: www.karigunterseymourpoet.com. A ninth generation Appalachian, she is the founder/executive director of the Women of Appalachia Project (WOAP) and editor of the WOAP anthology series, Women Speak. She is a recipient of a 2021 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship and Poet Laureate of Ohio.

Two Poems by Sandra Kohler

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Fall

In a nightmare my husband has converted
to a sect of fundamentalist Christianity and
is insisting I must do so also, otherwise I am
not “in the eyes of God.” It’s fall. The leaves
are falling. In the same dream, my husband’s
walking the dog and I am afraid he will fall.
Volatile fall. I am watching him too closely
and not closely enough. He should be back.
Have I missed the sound of his mother’s
clock striking? What do I miss? Safety.
Something I never had. I can’t imagine
wanting to be in the eyes of God. I want
to be in my husband’s eyes, in his good
graces, in his bed. He’s not at home. He
fell ill, is in the hospital, the ICU, I dream
of watching over him as I can’t these nights.
Waking, seeing my nightmare is dream,
my spirits rise. But he’s absent. It’s
autumn. My spirits fall with the leaves.

*

Seven Years

“It tires her to see the curve of heaven”
Aeneid, Book IV

Why does this line make me think about
my sister? On the seventh anniversary of
her death, I wake thinking of her once more,
of my connections with, my alienation from
her, my anger, my grief, my inability to let
either of them go, let her go, let myself be.

She was seven years older than I, when she
died she was the age I am today, if I died
today, I would be one with her. Just days
ago I found the grey sweater she knitted,
the only garment she ever made that fit me,
that I enjoyed wearing, and find myself

wanting to throw it away, be rid of it. How
to be rid of her? I can’t. If I forgave her,
would I be free? Perhaps I could. Forgive
her for being who she was, for failing me
both when I was a child after mother’s
death, and later, in our adult lives. Yet

I think I’m the one who needs to be
forgiven, for not visiting her in her last
years, the lost years at the end of her life.
Must I forgive her to forgive myself? Is
thinking of forgiving her doing so?
Repeating, retracting, reenacting this
past, present, I am as weary as Dido.

*

Sandra Kohler’s third collection of poems Improbable Music (Word
Press) appeared in May 2011. Earlier collections are The Country of
Women (Calyx, 1995) and The Ceremonies of Longing (University of
Pittsburgh Press, 2003). Her poems have appeared in journals, including
The New Republic, Beloit Poetry Journal, Prairie Schooner, and many
others over the past 45 years. In 2018, a poem of hers was chosen to be
part of Jenny Holzer’s permanent installation at the new Comcast
Technology Center in Philadelphia.