October
By Lydia Copeland Gwyn
I fall into the well of a poem, going down into the lovely dark. Stone by cool stone. It is narrow and wet and full of the things I know best. Someone rising from their bedsheets. Stars burning blue in the sky. A road full of fallen branches. Departed relatives, their boned bodies turned to ghosts. It is a night poem with knocking at the door, or maybe there is someone singing outside. A familiar lullaby with notes like a frill around a dress. It is this sound I cannot place in the poem. The whinnying of a horse. A Halloween decoration screaming from a neighbor’s lawn. But the poem is like a dream, and when I step outside there is a dampness in the air and no sound at all. Only a cold sky full of stars and the moon waiting, just as the poet said it would be, like a coin over an eyelid.
Lydia Copeland Gwyn’s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in F(r)iction, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, New World Writing, The Florida Review, JMWW and elsewhere. Her book of flash fiction, Tiny Doors, is available from Another New Calligraphy. She lives in East Tennessee with her husband and two children.