LJ Sante

All Is Gone, Now

Parked in front of St.Joseph’s.
Tiny,
tucked away from Main street
half hidden in small,
small America.
An old woman,
behatted
tending a scraggly rhodo.

Beneficent mother,
marble feet wreathed
in fading flowers,
shod in lichen,
palms open in acceptance,
in obedience,
patient, awaiting an old,
old promise.

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Flurry

Summer snow at dusk,
drawn by halogen, by drafts.
Slight tick against the windshield.
Some, released by a
force called by no name that I know,
one beauty flutters bridal white,
translucent, fully spread.

Its veins,
buttresses of delicate power
arc to apices,
flattened against thick glass,
caught.
They move in what seems
like desperate semaphore.

Hands against the wheel,
I feel a pang of guilt
at my complicity,
and ignoring the flurry of
other flakes,
turn into a well-known curve
to drive through the widening gate.

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LJ Sante is a musician and author living in New York. LJ is currently nearing the completion of a novel about the impact of anti-Native American racism on two intermarried families in twentieth-century rural Maine.

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