POETRY
Fall
I feel the fall playing fool with me, unweaving
the faithful tapestry of my days
The wash drowns your Theragun
the one I loaded into the laundry
and drenched with soap, all unaware.
Ripping renegade vines down,
I tear the ethernet cable off our house
and cut us off from the world, on hold, for weeks?
The fall hounds you too. You run,
breaking in your body along miles of sidewalk,
but your pace unpockets your phone to shatter it.
Beyond our own stupidity, roots strangle our pipes
to reverse three apartments of brackish water.
The temperature slips; we can’t find socks.
Today, we might have enjoyed a Saturday morning in bed.
But here we are in the basement, rummaging through
decades of rubbish, racing it up our stairs before
the city’s “clean sweep” trucks rumble past and cart it all away.
Currently Betsy Howard serves as an assistant professor of modern literature at Bethlehem College in Minneapolis, MN, and as an affiliate researcher at the University of Minnesota with the Center for the PreModern World. Her recent academic work has included essays in Religion and the Arts and Victorian Poetry. Her creative essays have appeared in Between Two Cities and Writing in the Margins, and her review of Joseph Bottum’s Second Spring recently appeared in Eikon. Betsy has had poems published in Ekstasis, Ad Fontes, The New Verse Review, Summit Avenue Review, and Tower Light.
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