May

The poem this poem is based on. Collage by Rachel B. Baxter.

One morning, I left the house
in my cable-knit cap and
boots, and by the time
I came home, summer
was seeping in through the floorboards
and through the attic window.
Nothing had been maintained —
not the yard, not my legs or toenails,
not the screen doors or storm windows,
though the heat’s arrival shouldn’t have
caught me off guard,
it had been quietly wandering here
for quite sometime:
a flower here, a spider there,
an abandoned nest of robins’ eggs,
a peregrine falcon in…