Photograph by Sherry Morris

Today we kick off a week of poetry. Don’t miss a day.

 

by David Cazden

Once the sun kissed you
to a blush-red shade.
Now a doctor

covers incisions
with balms and gauze, soft
as the haze over broken roofs

and crooked trees
of our neighborhood.
Perhaps you remember–

we crept on the lawn
past mushrooms throwing
spores fine as stars.

Similarly, I release
prayers to your bed,
but you’re still as sculpture

buried in pillows and sheets,
tucked like a passage
in a hymnal.

We’re still entangled
where honeysuckle winds
on weathered fences

gutters sip rain
and pine needles drift
from the eaves.

Perhaps we never left —
morning glories climb
the garden lattice, clinging

tight as shirts over ribs.
And perhaps the neighborhood waits
for our steps, a few blocks

from the hospital
where familiar clouds build,
disperse, build again.

Growing up, the seasons
gathered this way, turning to rain
in your gray eyes.

 

About the photographer: Originally from Missouri, Sherry Morris writes prize-winning fiction from a farm in the Scottish Highlands where she pets cows, watches clouds and dabbles in photography. She reads for the wonderfully wacky Taco Bell Quarterly and her first published story was about her Peace Corps experience in 1990s Ukraine. Her work has appeared with Longleaf Review, Fictive Dream, Molotov Cocktail and Barren literary magazines, among others. Visit www.uksherka.com for more of her published work. Find her on twitter @Uksherka.