Rebecca Temerario

Fall Tales

Underneath blue, piano-tuned skies

and a December dusk, worlds of spice

blossomed from the middle-aged woman's

pumpkin pie-scented candle,

as she sags into her armchair,

 reminiscent of the stale chairs they kept in care units in hospitals,

 there for the long haul, the woman thinks. And she

 mulls over the way she prays it could be Autumn again,

not the dreadful snow globe she's trapped herself in.

Biting her chapsticked lip, she rakes

her constant company of clusters of thoughts

so distraught like leaves that they were twisted and parched.

 Left to be a found fall leaf

 cowering beneath the winter pulp of gravel-like snow.

 The woman had become a sad, forgotten spectacle, crushed, at nineteen,

 by the weight of her own disparity.

She believed that her life had already begun and ended,

while continuously waiting for the inevitable Fall.