Dignity

by Caleb Jagoda

And then, it’s summer: The air dense as cornbread 
and sweet, too, the fireflies ambling fat and lazy and gone 
as soon as you spot them, an aeon exploding with friends
and drinking, dancing and laughter, all of it rushing over you 
like the forest’s deep green, the limbs of its pine trees heavier
than your eyelids after the span of a night spent bartending, 
shrinking time – its fullness – until it snaps, and so the yellow
of dawn follows, comes knocking, brings hot coffee in cool 
morning, slippery as the sun’s greased gleam because, soon, the rain 
drifts in like it’s lost, pokes through and glazes over brightness, 
which your favorite author calls fox rain, a time, she claims, 
when wolves host wedding feasts and witches brush their knots 
of mangy hair and everything feels alien but familiar 
like those hulking blocks of ice culled from the lake
during winter but insulated in summer, in sawdust, looming, blankly,
from ice shed, cloaked darkness, with a silent sort of radiance.

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Caleb Jagoda talks in aphorisms until those closest to him demand he stop—but hey, you know what they say: Buy the ticket, take the ride. Caleb is a poet, journalist, and MFA candidate at the University of New Hampshire, where he works as managing editor for Barnstorm Journal. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blue Earth Review, The Queens Review, and Down East Magazine. He lives in Dover, New Hampshire, and is big on the internet: www.calebjagoda.com.