~
Winter Water/Summer Air
on water burnt orange
burnt orange in air hanging
above milkblooms spraying
fragrance to make a body swoon
on water burnt orange threaded with black
black hemmed by white bright enough
to overflow photographs
in air burnt orange threaded with black
black piped with white
this day—your day you so long gone—post-solstice winter sun
only on water
the hooded drakes throw heads back purr
take off airborne burnt orange/black/white
arrowing us so we bleed for their summer replicas
those flutters burnt orange poison-bright
this day—your day—clouds hang thin veils on blue too stark for naked eyes
begin wool-gathering
soon on this day the tumbling sun
smothered in cottonwool
hangs smudged orange
burning ache under old scar
~
From Anca Vlasopolos: My credentials: the award-winning novel The New Bedford Samurai; the award-winning memoir No Return Address: A Memoir of Displacement; four collections of poems, Often Fanged Light (Adelaide Books, 2019), Cartographies of Scale (and Wing) (2015), Walking Toward Solstice (2012), and Penguins in a Warming World (2007); three poetry chapbooks, a detective novel, Missing Members, and over three hundred poems and short stories in literary journals. I write, read, garden, and pot on Cape Cod. Should you be interested in biographical details or links to my published work, please see www.vlasopolos.com.