Slow motion of childhood, eager summers, lawn mower
growls, sprints under sprinklers, rainbow halo of wet skin,
autumn tumbles in in heaps of leaves, winter snow taller
than elbows, dances among flakes, icicle fingers, ears and
nose red as happiness, spring bookbags strewn in the grass,
all seasons flee later in life, fast forward from green to grey
to white, home as an old woman without an aria, sped-up
chipmunk songs of envy, already note the distress of faded
hydrangeas, tomorrow’s anxiety of slick roads, time the
movie we can’t run backwards, onslaught of seasons like
sneezes unable to be stopped. Death’s a Bufflehead duck
on this great blue pond in space, paddling ever onward.
Go With the Flow
Lana Hechtman Ayers, architect of the “Severed Sonnet,” has shepherded over a hundred poetry volumes into print in her role as managing editor for three small presses. Her work appears in Rattle, The London Reader, Peregrine, and elsewhere. Lana’s latest collection, The Autobiography of Rain, is available from Fernwood Press.