Is there a month more full of sensory delights than October? Certainly, I can’t think of one. Scarlet leaves against a cerulean sky, the cool crispness of an autumn evening, the first taste of a just-picked mac. The scents and sounds, the sights and flavors, even the textures all abound.

In this month’s featured poem, poet Heather Corbally Bryant evokes the particular October joys known to those who have a home which boasts an apple tree.

Apples

By Heather Corbally Bryant

Sometimes, they say, deer come at night to munch

Apples—we would pay our children pennies to pick

Up newly fallen ones—the ones without crunch marks—

We would mash these beauties into amber-colored

Cider; wasps would swarm on warm autumn days—

Sweetness trickling down from the red wheel of the

Machine we shared with our neighbor—we would fill

Our wheelbarrow with piles of crushed apples and

Take them to the woods where we toss them—they

Would lie there, undisturbed, until the stags would

Wander through our forest in herds, loping through

Dusk to pick up the leavings; still, the smell of apples

Recalls early twilight October Evenings—our years

There came very close, or so I thought, to days of Eden.

Heather Corbally Bryant’s ninth collection, Practicing Yoga in a Former Shoe Factory, came out with the Finishing Line Press in August. Finishing Line Press also will publish her tenth poetry collection, Orchard Days (from which "Apples" comes), in the summer of 2021.