Seasonal
Blessed is the first day warm enough
for sandals and shorts, the body
breaking free from its winter fetters,
hard buds breaking into leaf.
A day sweet as a ripe peach, the bleak
gray-scale of winter replaced with forsythia,
lilac, hyacinth—colors so bright and solid,
I could bite into them and feel juice
on my chin. Fingers red from hulling
strawberries, shoulders pink under
the sun’s hot palm, everything I own
dusted golden with pollen.
Hard to believe that two months
from now, the ceiling fan will stutter
its apology for not making the day
bearable, a temperature that doesn’t
cling to the back of my neck like a leech.
Harder still to believe that a few months
after that, the sun will refuse to touch me,
pretend it never even knew my name.
Today it rises early, just to give itself
more time to love my skin, and I am
soil unburdened by snow, a crocus
bolting headlong into bloom,
a firefly that’s never seen a jar.
for sandals and shorts, the body
breaking free from its winter fetters,
hard buds breaking into leaf.
A day sweet as a ripe peach, the bleak
gray-scale of winter replaced with forsythia,
lilac, hyacinth—colors so bright and solid,
I could bite into them and feel juice
on my chin. Fingers red from hulling
strawberries, shoulders pink under
the sun’s hot palm, everything I own
dusted golden with pollen.
Hard to believe that two months
from now, the ceiling fan will stutter
its apology for not making the day
bearable, a temperature that doesn’t
cling to the back of my neck like a leech.
Harder still to believe that a few months
after that, the sun will refuse to touch me,
pretend it never even knew my name.
Today it rises early, just to give itself
more time to love my skin, and I am
soil unburdened by snow, a crocus
bolting headlong into bloom,
a firefly that’s never seen a jar.
March / April 2023
Suzanne Langlois is a poet and teacher from Portland, Maine. Her collection Bright Glint Gone won the 2019 Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance chapbook award. Her work has appeared most recently in Rust + Moth, Whiskey Tit, Menacing Hedge, and Cider Press Review, and has been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College.
Art: Aiyana Masla. Even the Air is Green in Our Neighborhood. Watercolor and ink.