Regret
“You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake.”
From “Antilamentation,” Dorianne Laux
Embrace the lovers too quickly
balled up and tossed away
like that first draft. When a gasp
of wind sweeps the tree
and you want only the feeling
of falling, know nothing of time
spent raking, gathering, bagging,
clearing gutters of detritus
so water flows again. Admire
the metaphors that never
should have mixed. Some-
times you must blow
up your life to change,
watch embers smoulder,
the image others had of you
turn to ash. Every choice
brought you here, where you
sit now, having learned
the only way you could have—
the hard way—to clear the yard.
*
At the Equinox
For a moment day equals night
before the sun slips toward winter,
shadows reach farther each day.
The cat who’s blind still thinks he’s
an explorer darting toward the door
opened where we scoop him close.
Inside, the world stands still. How
many days I forget to step
outside the door and all I see
are corners. Turn around,
a friend used to say,
there’s a whole world
just outside. Autumn
for instance is a sigh, a breath
let out through pursed lips.
Yesterday, I held the cat against
my chest as if that could soften
the hurt of a broken world.
*
Solitary
Always the first to bed, she pulls
the covers over her shoulders.
She lives on a street of houses
built in the fifties. Eyes closed,
she travels to those other homes,
sees her neighbors in their own rooms:
a girl dreams of what she can’t yet
see around the bend of a life,
a boy plays video games
in his bedroom’s darkness, a man
watches a show about smugglers
while his partner sleeps, a book
falls onto a woman’s chest as she reads,
a baby fusses in a crib.
Next door a woman who lived
a whole life in that one house
shuffles her walker toward the bed.
Across the street the man who had
a stroke still leaves his lights on late.
All of them invisibly bound,
as the day’s eyes close,
by one asphalt ribbon of road.
*
LeeAnn Pickrell’s first collection Gathering the Pieces of Days was published in April 2025. Tsunami, a memoir about her experience in the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, will be out in August 2026, also from Unsolicited Press. See more at leeannpickrell.com.