October 2020
/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.