by Jenna Le
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| November Rain - Contemporary Blue Abstract Painting by Gordan P. Junior |
November is a mammal, smoke-gray, meek.
Its lumbering body uses weighty flippers
to paddle, making short-lived silver streaks
in the surface of the bay where it’s immersed.
It loves the brackish waters of year’s end,
where black-green tufts of daydreams toss and seethe,
the fodder that it munches till it’s fattened
and farts its way up toward the sun to breathe.
At times, its blimp-like bulk, incautious, crashes
into our worries, our hurry to complete
our home improvement plans before the fractious
first snow, our human habit to mistreat
each other, our campaign ads, our work stress.
It wears those scars from one year to the next.
Jenna Le is the author of Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011) and A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2017), a Second Place winner in the Elgin Awards, and Manatee Lagoon (forthcoming from Acre Books, 2022). Her poetry appears in AGNI, Denver Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Verse Daily, and West Branch.