Glass Poetry Press

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Volume Six Issue Two

Lisa Bickmore

All Souls

Two weeks ago, there were tomatoes, sacksful, branches of basil, mint tipped with white stars, potatoes purple and yellow, fat garlic streaked mauve and white. Zucchini thickened past the picking point, bags of clipped greens, their stems tinged with root-ink. Lolla rossa and merveille de quatre saisons. A handful of peaches, too few for a bottle, a loll of small onions in wine-colored paper. Ears of corn still dressed in floss, flats of berries, too many for the refrigerator. But today the birds flee, leaves fly, the wind finds itself in full voice the rain, the rain decrees that the sacks will tear, juice leak, tubers bud blind, red berries gray and blueberries whiten, the leaves faint on their stems, squash wither and cloves diminish inside their paper partitions; lettuces self-translate into prosaic Anglo-Saxon, the mint smell like the cat. So late! we must cook and eat what we can now, think what will last the day, two days, the week: what will keep, what to give away, what we won't be able to save.