Threadbare
Like milk pouring from a glass
bottle, the mourning dove’s
velvet coo summons
my childhood in a mellow town
still tying off
its long seam of sleep.
Bedroom windows open
to the tang of cut grass,
tender violets, white-
tufted clover. Bumblebees
throb, thorns bristle
in sidewalk cracks
but I don’t heed their stings
or stabs. In a later house
on three acres of field
meted out in fabric swatches,
we snap annual photos
beside the boulder in the backyard,
my brother tends his first
monarch chrysalis, my mother’s
second cancer shrouds
the windowpanes of my room.
When I add morning dove
to our list of bird sightings,
Mom apprises me of the missing u.
I hear its muffled call—
not silk, but thread unraveling.
-First published in the Winter, 2024 issue of Passager
Annette Sisson’s poems are published in Valparaiso PR, Birmingham PR, Rust+Moth, Lascaux Review, Cider PR, Glassworks, Aeolian Harp Anthology, and others. Her first book Small Fish in High Branches was published by Glass Lyre (5/22), and she is finishing her second, Winter Sharp with Apples. Her poems have placed in Frontier New Voices, The Fish Anthology, and others; in 2023, two have been nominated for The Pushcart and one for Best of the Net.