Joanne Lowery // Poetry

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Hallow's Eve

A breezy warm harvest rain, suddenly more sky.
The trees have failed to sustain occlusion,
space swelling between branches, blue and gray replacing
green, gold and red, our sorry shade blown down.

How much is too much for bare trees to bear?
Each one exemplifies a thousand times over
how the word broken lies at the core of life,
the severed connection between stiple and twig,
the rush of separation as umbilical gives way.

We did not see our moon break away from earth,
assume a shapeshifter life all its own,
backlighting clouds and giving the night echo.

Each of the witches’ little broomsticks will snap,
the skeletons’ femurs fracture, every princess heart
suffer a unique zigzag cleft. They will look up

into a sea of emptiness, night spreading overhead.
Porch alternates with porch, everything or nothing.
As wrappers fly, the trees thin, the moon swells,
the crone wonders why this feels so much like breaking.

Joanne Lowery’s poems have appeared in many literary magazines, including Birmingham Poetry Review, 5 AM, Passages North, Rattle, Atlanta Review, and Poetry East. Her chapbook Diorama was the winner of the Poems & Plays 2006 Tennessee Chapbook Prize. She lives in Michigan.

Date of Publication: 03 May 2007