by Zoe Boyer

Sukkahs rise from the blue-bathed lawn
of houses rousing to thin October light,
walls half-strung with tarps, beams
bare and waiting; come evening they’ll
be woven with craft-store greenery,
foraged zinnias pinned to the lath.

Candles will burn on a laden table,
autumn’s fruits offered as a last grace
before every green thing goes to seed,
only the plastic vines above still lush,
stars bleeding through the lattice—
a reminder that shelter is a tenuous thing.

Am I meant to be grateful for a house
built frail, a threat always looming?
Am I meant to bless this brief gleaning
when the frost has come already and
polished the fields to a barren gleam?

I’m thankless—empty where joy should
have filled me up like good harvest, my life
a lean season and hunger the only sure thing.

I don’t count my blessings, but I can recite
the day’s litany: raw wind, cicadas shattered
over the pavement, thoughts withering
in a skull tender as a cracked seed, and this
roof full of holes where I feel terribly small
beneath the stars’ dizzying teem.

Zoe Boyer was raised on the shore of Lake Michigan. She completed her MA in creative writing among the ponderosas in northern Arizona, and now lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Her work has appeared The New York Times, Poetry South, Kelp Journal, Plainsongs, RockPaperPoem, West Trade Review, Little Patuxent Review, The Penn Review, and Pleiades, among others, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.