Fall Thinks It’s Draped in Splendor

                                                            by Angela Hoffman


and I fall for it too until the dark begins creeping in earlier
lingering longer. There’s a chill in the air
and the flannel I wear like the bumblebee’s velvet 
will never be adequate for the cold that’s coming
amid the sweet stickiness of honey, the cider, the ripeness. 
The songs of the crickets, cicadas won't stop reminding me
so I seal my heart in the jar along with the beets, bleeding.

The leaves seem aware. They are in full movement in the breeze
in the threshold between dancing and stillness
loving out loud, not reining in their indulgent dresses 
of ruby and gold in competition with the apples that drop
living between, before the rot, alive, but barely 
beside the river that too remembers how it will be covered in ice. 

This day is too brilliant, perfect, short lived for toasting mimosas. 
Where will the accumulations of the daily joys go?
And I think it is all a waste, for I know what’s around the corner.

The trees will unbutton, let their dresses slip to the ground
stand there vulnerable, bare-boned exposing knobby elbows
scars, knowing they will soon be dusted with powder
facing, bracing the long winter, eager for slumber 
wanting to forget this is the season that he left me alone. 

From where it comes, I do not know
but for a moment, I remember 
the season that comes after winter. 


* * * * *

Angela Hoffman’s poetry collections include Resurrection Lily (Kelsay Books, 2022) and Olly Olly Oxen Free (Kelsay Books, 2023). She placed third in the WFOP Kay Saunders Memorial Emerging Poet in 2022. Her poems have appeared in Solitary Plover, Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets’ Museletter and Calendar, Agape Review, Verse-Virtual, Visual Verse, Your Daily Poem, Writing In A Woman’s Voice, Moss Piglet, Amethyst Review, The Orchards Poetry Journal, POETiCA REViEW, Wilda Morris’s Poetry Challenge, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, and Whispers and Echoes. She has written a poem a day since the start of the pandemic. Angela lives in rural Wisconsin.