Yom Kippur
by Lisa Rosinsky
Late September afternoon, the air wrung dry,
no longer saturated by the clogged drain
of summer. Every thought feels marbled,
wedged between the ache and lure of memory,
that autumnal certainty: there’s nothing you can do
that won’t erupt like this, years later,
when your tectonic plates are shifting—
though I couldn’t say what it is I miss, or why
it hurts. A sleek quartet of crows looks up
as I crunch through a patch of leaves, crickets
stop rasping the same sepia-toned notes over
and over. The crows bounce towards the trees
on their prehistoric backward-bending legs
and I’m surprised to see the way they move,
that crows don’t strut or slink but bounce.
I dig out my keys, slip into the car. In the past
3,000 years, I read today, only 268 have been free
of war. Time slithers onwards, slinks or skulks,
and no matter how hard we try to stabilize,
we slide. The ignition catches and I pull out
of the lot. Leaves rise from the empty parking space
like small brown birds in my wake. In the mirror,
I watch the crows dance back over and reclaim
their spot. I roll down my windows, listening
for when the crickets will start up again.
Lisa Rosinsky has been a finalist for the Slapering Hol Chapbook Prize, the Fugue Poetry Contest, and the Morton Marr Poetry Prize. She is a graduate of the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and holds an MFA in poetry from Boston University, and in 2016, she won the Writer-in-Residence fellowship at the Boston Public Library. Her poems have appeared in Palette Poetry, SWWIM, Third Coast, Tahoma Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, Cimarron Review, Mid-American Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Baltimore Review, and other journals and anthologies.
