by Laura Donnelly

Summer


 

I was wrong to divide us
              into inside and out.

Thunder rolling but still
              more to say. A single

kind person can break me
              open. One mountain

covered in rain, one not,
              but between them

no line. It was all garden
              and it was all not.

My life had stood a poem
              that could and could not

hold two worlds at once.
              The middle of summer

is always like this, why
              I have only ever

fallen in love in summer.
             A single kind gesture.

The longest day
             spinning close

and then closer.
             Storm, heat.

Release.

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Laura Donnelly is the author of Watershed, which won the Cider Press Review Editors’ Prize. Her recent poems have been published by Indiana Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Poets.org, Missouri Review, and elsewhere. She is on the creative writing faculty at the State University of New York at Oswego.