September—The Cosmos and My Unreliable Heart

I’ve filched some last gladiolas and canna lilies

from the park to brighten things up with

the fog overtaking the cliff

and suggesting that everything floating above

the occluded waves is just sea-dust, salt. . . .

I place my flowers in a jug

and gaze out into the guesswork where we might

rise into untended fields of clouds, bright,

durable blossoms of the cosmos.

But nothing changes change. Didn't I go door to door

in my sea-checked uniform shirt, collecting

for “underprivileged children,”

ignoring holes in my P.F. Flyers, wondering what

exchange with fortune had me scrounging

for pop bottles to redeem and look

selfless dropping 6¢ in the box in front of class? God,

it’s argued, allows for hope, light at the edge

of our expectations, but a fatigue

arrives—of the spirit, of blood—sleep, old river, grey

moonlit boat, easy drifting . . . . but I ask, Who

wants to grow calm? So I still say

to hell with fame, insider trading as I once did complaining

with my unruly compadres on our dead summer

lawns, 1/2-way happy despite that

jerky rumba beneath my ribs. Now, I just want to breathe

as steadily as particles of light arriving from who-

knows-where as I drum my fingers on

the lawn chair, a traffic of protons and electrons clicking

through me like off-kilter castanets. I might even

accept that someone, at the margin of

the blue, is scribbling out our fates regardless of biology

or a demonstrable lack of interest? If so, I hope

their hand doesn't cramp, as I go along

with a posse of blackbirds, looking for our luck in a parking lot,

enjoying their unqualified fellowship as we dawdle,

aware of the improbability of life-ever-after

as 1/2 of the state burns away again and there's no way to recall

Mesozoic rains that rose out of the seas to water

forests from Carpathia to Punta Arenas.

We've been on our own for ages, never mind the cortege

of angels who've been asleep at the wheel. I should

be grateful to have made it this far, yet

don't feel like cracking a bottle of Reposado, and singing

a chorus of El Rancho Grande, half my compadres

among the dearly departed—reason enough

to recall the lyrics to “September in the Rain?” and point to

the sun, going out like a dying ember. For the time

remaining, I salute the planets, even

the ones we no longer acknowledge. May I catch light in

a soup can—may my heart hold out a bit longer

against the randomness and the rust.

Christopher Buckley's Sprezzatura was published by Lynx House Press in 2025. Early & Late is coming from Cloudbank Books in 2026. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, two NEA grants, a Fulbright Award in Creative Writing, and four Pushcart Prizes. Most recently he has edited Naming the Lost: the Fresno Poets—Interviews & Essays.

Past the Back Forty

I.

I started to learn what to ask for

in the ranch land behind the back forty of a neighbor’s place

among hidden oaks with burls the size of truck engines.

I often got what I wanted growing up.

Once, we’d made our bodies into a kind of bridge

as if we were crossing over from ourselves—

we had been found that way and glistening,

we were halfway to somewhere, cosmos in our eyes,

drunk with pleasure. And when my love

got grounded, I went where the big trees

of the valley dipped their long arms. I was mostly looking

down, hungry for beauty as it rose like steam

out from the deergrass as summer came on.

By the silence of animals watering, deep roots commingling,

the summer cliffs and their thorny brush,

I didn’t mean to be wherever I was headed.

Who when young is ready

for the soul’s blunt honesty, even a reflection

of the psyche on a farm pond? Plunking

waves, craters carrying away frog eggs

rafts on the greening water.

The fish were rising in the warm afternoon,

but I had never asked the old man

who caretook the land

to go so deep among the giant oaks and ponds.

Something in the trees, their knots feathered with first alien

leaves, had tried to warn me: I wasn’t supposed

to see it yet—but I knew it then: everything can read

us straight down to sinew, bone, a grist

beyond what it is we might have meant.

II.

The years came and went.

I saw my old love in the supermarket. Over coffee,

she said, When we were back there, running wild,

what passed for pleasure was a mask.

For me, it wasn’t an ecstasy, not yet . . . .

Looking off, she said she’d wanted me to know.

In the fairground parking lot where I learned to drive

a truck is selling oak, split

by the cord. Chainsaw grease has stained

the wood. Or was it the water inside the tree?

The kind that would grow tepid,

rotting the trunk until it split to a fetid gush.

The kind of thing I wouldn’t foresee—

how even the heartwood could be frail.

What could I have known of its current and grain,

running up and down the grove, around the pond,

gone behind the back forty, in love or alone,

with nothing on my mind but song?

Adam Michael Finney, a graduate of Warren Wilson's MFA program, is living and teaching in the foothills near Yosemite. Recently, his poetry has been published in Allium, and his criticism has appeared in Cleaver.

Signs of Perimenopause

long bands of snow scrunchies wrap

thinning ribbons of road this morning

driving to where I misremembered we were

supposed to meet at 5am to run

in 5 degrees, my whole face scuffed

with cold

later I forget the quizzes and rush back

to my office for them, salting my heels

on grimy ground clouds between buildings

my own students tell me it’s martial not marshal

as I am writing on the board I become

thermally unstable, red rectangle

glasses fogging up

framing everything through rectangles converges

our thinking, I've known this

since grad school,  when I told you

I’d be there and I wasn’t,  I surprised even myself,

I can only keep so many things at eye level

where I can track them

tonight our bodies quiver like eggs dropped in a bed

of boiling water, shell-less and briefly see-through

before obfuscating to white  but when I wake

in a quilt of palms, it's only my own sweat slowly

denaturing  me

Abigail Michelini (she/her) is a Pushcart-prize nominee whose work can be found in SWWIM, The Main Street Rag, and Thimble Literary Magazine, among other publications. Her scholarly work has been published in The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics and Writing Center Journal. She is the author of the chapbook, Brace (Thirty West Publishing House, 2025) and teaches writing at Northampton Community College. When she's not writing, you can find her running Pennsylvania back roads. Find her at www.abigailmichelini.com and on Instagram @abigailmichelini