Shadows crowd around your feet. A dappling
of darkness. Even at straight-up noon.
Then you notice the horizon’s inched closer.
You can nearly scrape the snow off the Olympics
and the sea’s swallowing the last thought
you held. Forgotten in the constant
tidal pull. You once lived by the moon.
Counted on its wax and wane. Its persistence
like the button rising on the alarm clock.
Now time is marked by the season.
It’s late fall, red maple leaves bloody the park.
Everywhere your eye travels, a reminder.
At the aquarium, an octopus alone in her tank.
Nearly two, she will die soon.
You wonder if her three hearts stop together,
or power off one by one. When a plane loses
an engine, it continues to fly but drifts
down in altitude. You imagine the octopus
shuffling the tank floor, its redundant hearts failing.
You once offered your extra kidney
to an acquaintance. You have been steadily giving
away possessions, paring back, accumulating loss.
When your friend says we’ve only got twenty good
years ahead of us, you nod at the plane sputtering
along the horizon’s outline, mutter
about how spectacular the sunsets of late.
–
Heidi Seaborn is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and winner of the 2022 Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize in Poetry. She is the author of three prize-winning books of poetry: An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe ([PANK], 2021), Bite Marks (Comstock, 2021), Give a Girl Chaos (C&R Press, 2019). Heidi holds an MFA from NYU.