by Therese Gleason
With a line from “All Hallows” by Louise Glück (1943-2023)
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I want to write a poem about autumn that doesn’t decay and stink on impact. I want to write a poem about the beauty of small children (whose shoelaces flap and sneakers slap asphalt) that doesn’t reek of sweetness. All I can offer is a dispatch from a mid-October recess in central Mass., the sky scrubbed squeaky by an overnight rainstorm, where kindergarteners skip and whoop as the wind picks up, pointing to heaven as the tall honey locust drops its shower of gold: spiraling eddies that drift slowly, softly onto cracked concrete. The bulky apartment complex next door peeps between ragged bushes and chain link as I holler at a child to come down the hill, away from the edge of the dark wood where scattered syringes linger in the barrenness of harvest or pestilence: our playground tree a site of life and death, both honey and locust, feast and famine. We found a dead mouse beneath its fraying canopy last week. I stood astride the carcass swatting curious fingers seeking to probe its torn side buzzing with flies, its tiny bared teeth—and in an instant I remember the sickening bump under my back left tire, a raccoon on a dark road, how I honked and swerved, too late… I can’t forget its wobbly tromp, its eyes blinded by my headlights before I rendered it dead meat— I feel a tug like grief, like a small hand at my sweater’s hem, and look down into cupped palms brimming with tattered gold leaves.
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Therese Gleason is author of three chapbooks: Hemicrania (forthcoming, Chestnut Review, 2024); Matrilineal (Honorable Mention, 2022 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize, New England Poetry Club); and Libation (co-winner, 2006 South Carolina Poetry Initiative Competition, selected by Kwame Dawes). Her poems appear in 32 Poems, Indiana Review, New Ohio Review, Notre Dame Review, Rattle, and elsewhere. Originally from Louisville, KY, she is an adjunct creative writing instructor at Clark University and an ESL teacher in the Worcester Public Schools.
Wonderful poem. So much truth.