October
Jane Huffman | Poetry
It is an easy leap between words.
On my dog walk, drying
hydrangeas on every other stoop.
Drying hydrangeas where there
were only hydrangeas yesterday.
When I use these words
aloud, they become dying, derangement.
Dying, derangement. An easy leap
over the stone wall between
a word and the sound it makes.
Dying hydrangeas on every other
stoop. Death and arrangement.
It is an easy leap between worlds.
Dog walk. Open loop.
Jane Huffman is the author of the poetry collection, Public Abstract, winner of the 2023 APR/Honickman First Book Prize. She is a doctoral candidate in English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver. Her poems have appeared in The Nation, Poetry Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. She was a 2019 recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.