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Elegy for Later

Dusk smudging the fall-befallen branches, their intricate and maddening script. In my casual, childhood home it would have been unnatural to be so aware of what I say, what I resay, what I leave unsaid for another, next time. But here, but now. Waiting for darkness to overtake the new nakedness between the trees, the wind sends a stipple of rain closer, against the windshield. I am sitting for a second at the hospital with the parked cars, streetlights already sponging their backsides. Streetlights I hadn’t noticed glowing, amongst the strict forms of steel and glass, until now. Rising, this alternative moon, unaccustomed to a moon’s peace, imprecise as later. As lather, as leather, as father, and all things we read a word.

the angle of his hospital bed—
a flock of geese
in each other’s wind

Jennifer Met lives in a small town in North Idaho. Recent work is published in Cimarron Review, Nimrod, Ninth Letter, Superstition Review, and Zone 3, among other journals. She is the author of the microchapbook That Which Sunlight Chases (Origami Poems Project) and the chapbook Gallery Withheld (Glass Poetry Press).

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