false spring I untangle the horse’s mane with my fingers dab ointment to his rain- rotted- crest. Two men coax an augur from a long, thin box wary- eyed dogs bark through Shrinky Dinked windows. The drug store on the corner is over- stuffed we wait fifteen minutes in folding chairs. Baby Darling, Dearest, My Dear, croon the fiber- optic hearts of half- price love- sick bears.
From the author: “False Spring” & “Love Letter” are part of a manuscript in progress, tentatively titled, Sky Burial. “Love Letter” is one of a series of prose pieces that use the quirky justify text setting in Microsoft Word as a formal constraint. Each poem in this set conforms to a perfect block.
Summer J. Hart is an interdisciplinary artist and writer from Maine, living in the Hudson Valley, New York. Her written and visual artworks are influenced by folklore, superstition, divination, and forgotten territories reclaimed by nature. She is the author of the full-length poetry collection, Boomhouse (2023, The 3rd Thing Press) and the microchapbook, Augury of Ash (Post Ghost Press.) She is a recipient of a 2022 MacDowell Fellowship. Her poetry can be found in Heavy Feather Review, Waxwing, The Massachusetts Review, Northern New England Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. Summer is a member of the Listuguj Mi’gmaq First Nation.
