Image Source: Unsplash- Mars Immigrant
Once it was said
that August was a melancholy month:
a sobering pill that’s hard to swallow, which
you’ll cradle in the pothole of your tongue.
The coffee is percolating in the corner
and I can taste the coldness of your breath
as a burgundy bloom spills
like champagne over a tablecloth
across the back garden
drenched
in the departure of curling copper leaves.
Can you feel my fear unfurling
over the hairs on my arm? It is brittle,
immovable, and suffocatingly large
to forget over the simple morning pleasure
of a brew with hands carved around my mug:
a porcelain creature I’ve captured
and don’t dare break away from.
My old friend is coming to reunite with us again
after a long, sleepy year
yet I still host the grief of losing Summer
for the first time more stiflingly than ever before
and it’s clear
that I have changed, the older I’ve become,
and emotions strike with more pain now
instead of sliding in comfortably numb.
I hold her passing close,
cherish her freedom
in the floating chiffon of my clothes
and wish that I could break away
out of this self-indulgent pitying state,
transfigure all of my woes into better fates
like the intricate entanglement in the thread
of a spider’s silk web
morphing my mind into new shapes,
time her last breaths to
that beat in my chest,
glance to the watch on my sleeve
as the seasons continue to tick away, what’s left of the year, as I drift in and out of sleep
plotting prophecies like a seer.
But yet, I must remember
that I won’t shed a tear. Summer used to feel
foreign to me, too hot-headed to handle
, and always too stubborn to leave.
And now, I kindle hot water
with cinnamon sticks in a pot,
humming to the tune of a gentle simmer
feeling hopeful at the thought,
curdling my seasonal potion
under the caress of my palms,
spoiling the seasons long past
into the hearth of the damned. The
trees have had their bark poisoned
by the ghosts of old,
I can hear them choking in the distance
on the thick netting of campfire smoke
from the burning wood-piles,
finding comfort in the symphony of spices,
will delight in getting my fingers greasy
in the delicacies of all I aspire to be
in cuttings of pumpkin pies
and crunch of apple seeds
to welcome in the new season,
ripe and as becoming as a new fruit
as I flirtatiously commit treasons
which lead me into a buttery syrup
of regaining my tangled inner truth,
impatiently, nursing back my insatiable sweet tooth
and I sit with it.
For my friend, Autumn has returned
there is no death in her mind
only the rotting of the old world
as she stencils a new one, more defined,
cradled between the hush of her index and thumb
a flush copper of foliage
striking in cloaked decay from midsummer’s shun
and I turn on the lights I have inside
through the toxic thoughts and twisted roots
both as unruly as they are mild
as the red-haired wild time of the year draws near:
Nature’s beautifully forgotten, wild,
lost child.
This was written by our contributing writer, Aimee Donnell.
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