Here I am wearing June on my fingers,
earrings on my ankles, skinny dipping
in a public pool regardless of awe-struck
children, writing a note between gillyflowers,
slurping breakfast on the ice veranda, braiding
lavender though it’s long been brown.
Kissing you is like slipping
into the honey-nest
- don’t know how I fit
but here I am in the warm
harvest while outside
brash end-of-November
flowers dry and crinkle.
Strangers marvel at the auburn castle we build
with our mouths for a door. Here I am - right as stone,
unwavering in your ever-June arms, as if
it isn’t already winter and you’re never going to leave.
Shari Caplan is the author of “Advice from a Siren” (Dancing Girl Press). Her work can be found at Zoetic Press, is forthcoming from Blue Lyra Review and Deluge and has earned her a scholarship to The Home School in Hudson, NY as well as a grant for the Vermont Studio Center. Caplan has worked on The VIDA Count, as a reader for Sugar House Review, and as co-editor of Soundings East. She received her MFA in Poetry from Lesley University.
