by Catherine Abbey Hodges

At last and all of a sudden,
here it is: the afternoon to turn
summer’s last tomatoes,
some on the sill and others still
on the vine, into soup to freeze
for the months to come.

You take the chipped blue
bowl from the high shelf
and we head to the garden.
Overhead, what someone
called a buttermilk sky, sky
banking left from the long
bright days toward winter,
which is to say a mortal sky,
sky-sign of endings, death-
facing sky, lit still
with summer’s last syllables.
We fill the bowl again
and again with tomatoes
warm and heavy in their skins.

Later, we’ll listen
to what we can bear of the news,
and I’ll refuse the violence
that won’t end and must end
a place at the table
of this one poem
while the tomatoes burble
in their complex juices,
fragrant with the further
complications, complicities
if you will, of garlic
and rosemary.

We’ll look at each other.
It’s too much, you’ll say,
or I will—we take turns
like we used to tell the children
to do, and I lose track. Maybe
we’ll step outside where the early
stars will aver for the hundredth
time that the dark overtaking
the sky is another kind of light.
Though we’ll shake our heads
as always,
maybe this time we’ll pray
that somehow they know
something we don’t.

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Catherine Abbey Hodges is the author of In a Rind of Light, forthcoming from Stephen F. Austin State University Press in February 2020. Her previous full-length collections are Raft of Days (Gunpowder Press 2017) and Instead of Sadness (Gunpowder Press 2015), the latter selected by Dan Gerber as winner of the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize. Catherine teaches English at Porterville College in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Learn more at www.catherineabbeyhodges.com.