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AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News. |
Leaves here are notorious, glorious and over-reported. Cars clog the notches in mountain roads as cell phones capture luminous but fleeting colors that flash all the way to Canada. Everything falls. Branches that endured heat and drought and quenching rains crack and crash like broken promises for healing healthcare. Storms grab leaves, sails unprepared to survive to make a chaos of lawns and a litter of forests. Shedding before the nakedness of winter. Hands that wield a rake are prone to blister. This state holidays honors the Abenaki people, ancestor-caretakers of the land, while Christopher Columbus statues tumble to the ground, nose first into the dirt. The Hunter Moon witnesses as a bald man whose lips hold tight his sour secret–casting a night light that prey hide from in the verges of the reaping, just-mowed fields. Outside the chiropractor’s office near town a 20-foot-skeleton with flashing red eyes leans on the doctor’s advertising sign. At a house down the road, a Tarot-like man hangs by one foot from the rafters, dressed reminiscent of Uncle Sam, twists in the wind–the residents’ nod to weak guns laws, a protest of ICE violence and a proposal to live-stream the death by firing squad of a wheelchair-bound terrorist. On rain-wet roads people rush to deposit marked ballots early to town halls to second-guess what may go wrong next. The children know days march toward Halloween and the Day of the Dead, a stampede toward candy cached in pillowcases, the subterfuges of breeze-blown gauzy ghosts hanging on white strings on front porches, and the scurry of small-feet boot prints in mud. Nothing stands still among the windswept.
Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet who cast her vote days before the No King's actions. She pays close attention to seasonal storm winds of both politics and climate change. She is writing prose poems these days though her collection of free verse about aging, Gathering Marbles, is coming out from Fernwood Press in July 2027.
