Let’s sit on the porch in the late afternoon sun—
that untarnishable golden glow—and spit
sunflower hulls into an old flower pot.
The porch boards will creek with the rhythm
of the rocking chair, and a June bug will buzz
and beat its clumsy body against the screen.
The day will have lapsed into silence, you
and I staring out over the hayfield, the ice
in our iced tea long since melted, and then
suddenly it will be dusk and then dark
and the cool damp of evening will settle
on our skin, and the worms of melancholy
will pull their long bodies from the dirt
and stretch their lengths in the damp grass.
Can you see it? This scene that will not
happen, because you are imaginary,
and the tea is imaginary, and the hayfield,
and the flower pot half-full of sunflower hulls.
The worms of melancholy, though, those are real.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 25, Issue 3.
Suzanne Langlois’s is a teacher from Portland, Maine. Her collection “Bright Glint Gone” was the winner of the 2019 Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance chapbook award. Her work has appeared in journals such as Quarterly West, Rust + Moth, Leon Literary Review, Scoundrel Time, and in the 2022 Best New Poets Anthology. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College.
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