at the end of the summer i forget how to fall

maybe i don’t remember the interim

the place where dark and light

stayed separate

there must have been times when we were whole

and the world shined in the sun,

a plastic toy bathed by the dewy grass.

but now when i think back all i recall

is the merging, shifting, nights when

the morning came too soon

before i had a chance to cry myself

to sleep. and the times when things fell

apart into their elements: music

became sound and silence, poems jumbles

of gray letters on gray paper, every action

reversing its coalescence into elation or heartbreak,

then nothing.

By Anna Leah Lacoss