Today’s New Verse News: MULCHING LEAVES and MIDTERMS
two poems: one by John Minczeski and one by Adin Thayer
MULCHING LEAVES
by John Minczeski
It’s an asterisk in the middle of the day; it’s the dust filtering through the mower’s bag, the shimmer I wade through that collects on my jeans, in my lungs; it’s me piling the partially digested leaves on raised beds, next July’s harvest a universe away. I want to say grass storm and rain delay over red maple leaves like a priest giving benedictions. Every day it’s the coming elections. Ads warn of the worst. I’ve come to expect the worst. It’s the mower spitting leaves into the bag, leaving a widening strip of green. Such a solemn inhalation, this dust. Incense, and a threat of silence.
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John Minczeski is the author of "A Letter to Serafin" and other collections. Poems have appeared in The New Verse News, One Art, Tampa Review, Harvard Review, and The Saint Paul Almanac. Minczeski, who lives in St. Paul, has taught in poets in the schools, at The Loft Literary Center, and at various colleges around the Twin Cities.
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by Adin Thayer
The heft of the planet’s turbulence the severing nation burst into wails there were leaves falling everywhere raining free gold and apricot littering the path with the bright carved shapes of renewal and why why can not this world itself lead us errant citizens down this path where mingled leaves of maple oak and ash together anonymously mix the trees’ spring supply of delicious dirt this path not the other
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Adin Thayer has worked in a variety of roles, as a psychotherapist, a teacher at the Smith College School for Social Work, and a peacebuilding facilitator in several African countries. In addition to what she draws from these sources, her work engages her childhood growing up in Virginia when it was a legally segregated state. Her poems address how the lawfulness and beauty of the natural world provides sustenance in the face of human struggle. One of five sisters and the mother of two daughters, she lives in Massachusetts. She published a volume of poetry, The Close World, in 2020.