Threadbare
Like milk pouring from a glass
bottle, the mourning dove’s
velvet coo summons
my childhood in a mellow town
still tying off
its long seam of sleep.
Bedroom windows open
to the tang of cut grass,
tender violets, white-
tufted clover. Bumblebees
throb, thorns bristle
in sidewalk cracks
but I don’t heed their stings
or stabs. In a later house
on three acres of field
meted out in fabric swatches,
we snap annual photos
beside the boulder in the backyard,
my brother tends his first
monarch chrysalis, my mother’s
second cancer shrouds
the windowpanes of my room.
When I add morning dove
to our list of bird sightings,
Mom apprises me of the missing u.
I hear its muffled call —
not velvet, but thread unraveling.
Copyright © 2024 by Annette Sisson. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. Annette Sisson is the author of Small Fish in High Branches (2022). Her poems have been published in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Cider Press Review, Aeolian Harp Anthology, and elsewhere. She won The Porch Writers Collective’s 2019 Poetry Prize. Sisson lives in Nashville, where she is a professor of English at Belmont University.
Tagged: 2024 Southern Festival of Books, Book Excerpt, Poetry
