New England's Wrong Seasons

By Frances Grossen

For a week, maybe more, I’ve had a cough that won’t leave 

punctuating my days with dragon’s fire. 

The pain performs ballets of lightning, blooming, 

reminding me I’ve not been careful with my seasons. 

I uprooted, ran head first into the cold… 

sorry. Shower steam sent me into reveries. 

They flutter before the window mirroring those colorful reveries. 

A burnt connection between my breath and the leaves; 

crisp movements harmonizing the cold 

and all this horrid, psychosocial fire. 

My body knows instinctively that the seasons 

here are all wrong. Spring should blossom 

full of water, bring to life blossoms, 

then forget its frost pains like we forget our reveries 

eventually, with each change of season. 

Each year, surprised by the leaves 

red, yellow, purple fire 

or a spreading bruise, hardened by cold

spreading under New England’s cold

frost. I invite my hometown friends to witness Fall trees bloom, 

warm themselves by this natural interpretation of flame, 

provide contemporary insights sticky with reverie, 

but mostly to take advantage of the beautiful leaves, 

a picturesque utopia of promise from the seasons. 

In truth these storms rub our flesh with seasoning 

and salt, thaw our black ice hearts slowly in the cold 

and leave, 

suddenly, soon as we realize we didn’t bloom. 

The earth was barren all along, smelling not of petrichor but reverie 

burning us up inside out like a house fire. 

I truly didn’t know how to douse that fire 

or turn as simply as the next season. 

We keep slipping into our own reveries 

stuck together like ice pressed by cold. 

I couldn’t scrape the pollen out from the blooms. 

These are the reasons you had to leave. 

But I kept some fire for a cold night, 

so in the wrong season for flowers, I can slip these 

reveries out the window, watch them dance with the leaves.

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Frances studied English at Boston University where she acted as editor-in-chief for Clarion Magazine and poetic editor for Pen and Anvil Press. Her work has appeared in the Journal of the Core Curriculum and Dulwich OnView. Currently she lives in Louisville, Kentucky where she does her best to avoid bourbon and the Derby.