The End of Summer is Not the End of the Season
The roses have been sewn shut; the curtains tricked into parting; I return to my apartment a visitor. You said we were closed for the season, our first swim the last swim of the summer.
The peaches melting on my counter know better than to rely on preservation. I rearrange my furniture so it can hold me. Each night tears the hem of my skirt, revealing a wishbone between my legs that always breaks in your favor.
Tonight my shadow bends into an outline of two branches intersecting in a bedroom. Tomorrow, I’ll pull all the laughter from my pockets, sew it into a season where the phone rings often and not every passing black truck is yours.
Prelude to Divided Landscapes
In a gas station bathroom halfway to Ohio, a penny falls heads up. This isn’t a poem about luck, but rain pausing under bridges; of the summer my hands become capable wings. You persist like the moon in daylight, my passenger, my window left open. Softer still are the months pressed behind us: dusty palm prints on car hoods, conversations between blades of grass, highway stretching in motion. The beginning of August is still an ending, where the world grows too large and distance quickly husks. With nothing left to hold I dress as the wind.
Rachel Cruea is pursuing an MFA in creative writing at the University of Colorado- Boulder. She is originally from Ohio, where she received her BA in creative writing and literature from Ohio Northern University. Along with working on TIMBER journal. she has had her poems previously published in editions of The Pinch, The Adroit Journal, Birds Piled Loosely, and elsewhere.