Warm dusks too hot to sip anything

but rum and look north & north & north
like cold nights when the aurora glows.
Meatballs, size of a small river stone

hand curved, roasted & frozen
saved like speckled marbles in a jar.
Cattails bent over their pond

as if signing a mortgage. 
Driftwood waving her wild bone

arms at the end of the sea
as if she untangled from nowhere, with

everywhere sprouting from her fingertips.
Boy perched on the rock above the cliffs above the river,

the second his pointed toes depart the rock.
The dive & the cold.

His wet head above the eddies.
The now & the now & the now

like the filly, top lip stretched so far above the brambles,
stomping to ram her fragile adolescent

chest against the fence
as if she could close the last hovering inches

between the taste of blackberries 
& empty air.
Sierra Golden is our Poet in Residence for September.