Tend

Tend

That sun sure knows what it’s doing
When it goes down. Too long

To stop now, our song warns. Desire is
Dead. Long live desire. The bruised

Tomato of late July. The low-top
All-Stars banging in the dryer. Even

The cicadas are tired of having to
Repeat themselves. Sugar, you have

A favorite drinking glass because you know
One cathedral day you will break it. Like you,

The forsythia’s long gone. Our allowed
Yellows: lemon twist, timecards. Hard

Pats of butter on a cold plate. Later & late
There is only prep & an endless pouring:

Bourbon, confession, branch, a body
Loosened from its own work. Humidity

A dream rain has about all its teeth
Falling out. All our punched hours,

Love. If you don’t have to go
Home, then where. We are asking

For a loan, Orpheus says, & Hell
Signs its name on a bar napkin.

Amy Woolard is a legal aid attorney working on civil rights policy & legislation in Virginia. Her debut poetry collection, Neck of the Woods, received the Alice James Award and was published in April 2020 by Alice James Books. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Poetry, Boston Review, Ploughshares, Fence, & elsewhere, while her essays and reporting have been featured in publications such as Slate, The Guardian, Pacific Standard, The Rumpus, and Virginia Quarterly Review. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

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