The Amon Liner Poetry Award Poem NOVEMBER

Abigail Browning

The pumpkin face sags

like a chemo patient’s,

 

spots down the temples,

weighted, sloping cheeks.

 

Pockets in long black coats

fill with elegies. Everything

 

that was is entropied and organized;

Mother is dead and the world

 

travels its tethered arc.

The farmers carve new rectangles

 

in the soil, each plot

a blank face in the earth’s geometry.