“Spring” by Chloe Honum
Mother tried to take her life.
The icicles thawed.
The house, a wet coat
we couldn’t put back on.
Still, the garden quickened,
the fields were firm.
Birds flew from the woods’
fingertips. Among the petals
and sticks and browning fruit,
we sat in the grass and
bickered, chained daisies, prayed.
All that falls is caught. Unless
it doesn’t stop, like moonlight,
which has no pace to speak of,
falling through the cedar limbs,
falling through the rock.
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Chloe Honum’s Artist Statement: Chloe Honum’s first book of poems, The Tulip-Flame (Cleveland State University Press, 2014), was named a finalist for the 2015 PEN Center USA Literary Award and winner of Foreword Review’s 2014 Book of the Year Award. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, Agni, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2009 Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and a 2016 Pushcart Prize. Her chapbook, Then Winter, was published by Bull City Press in 2017. Chloe was born in Santa Monica, California, and raised in Auckland, New Zealand.
