The Paddock Review

Burial Mounds (The New Year)

 

 

The sun setting at our backs, we drag 

your mother’s tree out to the bay, fir needles 

 

shedding along the sidewalk. Christmas trees 

are piled at the beach entrance. Some, discarded 

 

weeks ago, are amber now, thinning, nearly buried 

in the dunes’ eroding gowns. We pick an empty 

 

spot beyond the wrack line where the wind stirs dried algae 

and crab carcasses along the hard-packed shore.  

 

On our return, you reach for my hand, gummed 

and coarse with sand and resin. You know another 

 

way—we walk past silver and blue ornaments 

still hanging from a dogwood tree, take a shortcut 

 

behind the cedar-sided cottage, our path 

strung with lights that the neighbors left up.

….

This poem is from the book Species by Jessica Conley (Finishing Line Press) and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/species-by-jessica-conley/

Species is a collection of poetic exercises in counterpoint, which includes poems that highlight tensions and realizations of beauty and survival despite contrary belief. Each of the four sections features a season of grief, hope, and love. Through speakers that surrender themselves to music, these poems sing of dreams within and beyond the self.