Tonight the Winds     

by Kari Gunter-Seymour
                                               

The winds tonight could be beautiful
if they didn’t feel so rawboned.
I watch the yard shift, spring blooms
ripped from stems, bodiless wings,
mangled chroma littering the grass,
the creek burbling. 

I’m toting a notebook,
a stray felt-tip pen, pink ink.
Scraps of verse ride climbing currents.
I take them as they come,
consider failures, margins of loss,
each word a blush.                             

Soon rain will muscle its way,
insist on its place. I will run,
fawn fleet in the pale leaf light,
notebook a slipshod shelter,                          
pray none of the bones    
the creek spits up will be mine.


* * * * *

"Tonight the Winds" is from Kari Gunter-Seymour's poetry collection Alone in the House of My Heart (Swallow Press, 2022).

Kari Gunter-Seymour is the Poet Laureate of Ohio and a 2021 Academy of American Poets laureate Fellow. Her poetry collections include Alone in the House of My Heart (2022), A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen (2020), and Dirt Songs (forthcoming 2024). Her work has been featured on Verse Daily, World Literature Today, the New York Times and Poem-a-Day.