October: A Haiku Story
Want is a cold wind.
I watch the leaves fly soundless
And dream of roots, deep.
If I catch a leaf,
Pin it close, scarlet, umber,
Will I be a tree?
Reaching high, sightless,
What’s left behind remembered,
Wrapped around my feet.
When October
When sunscreen scented t-shirts and every pair of shorts is tucked away again, when jackets wearing creases from a season in the drawer hang beside the door, when the wind begins to skip the step of going around and goes right through instead, when smoke in the air means comfort not calamity, when dinner may be soup in a mug held close, when night is long and books are longer, when lawns put on coats of leaf and mushroom and squirrels play hide and seek, when knitting needles click in coffee shops and scarves are not just fashion, when only gulls and otter leave tracks on the beach and all the kids are back in school, when old breaks long healed begin to ache, I pull at memory, spread it over me and fall asleep, warm again.
Kristen MacKenzie lives on Vashon Island in a quiet cabin where the shelves are filled with herbs for medicine-making, the floor is open for dancing, and the table faces the ocean, waiting for a writer to pick up the pen. Her work has appeared in Brevity, Rawboned, GALA, Extract(s) Daily Dose of Lit, Maudlin House, Blank Fiction, Cease, Cows; Crack the Spine, Eckleburg, Referential, Bluestockings, NAILED, Knee-Jerk, Crab Fat, Mondegreen, Minerva Rising and Wilderness House and is included monthly in Diversity Rules. Pieces are forthcoming in MadHat Annual, and Prick of the Spindle. Her short story, “Cold Comfort,” placed in Honorable Mention in The Women’s National Book Association’s annual writing contest.
Her most current work is available here: http://themondegreen.org/pinball/, http://thedoctortjeckleburgreview.com/product/new-world/.
Photo by Kristen MacKenzie