I am at that point I reach every spring and fall — I am tired of the intensity of the season and ready for change. This has been a dank late summer, and I feel worn and beaten in several ways. Sitting outside in what writer John Graves would have called the “damp, malarial windlessness” of early September, I was reading and listening to the bagpipe drone of the locusts. I felt a tickle, and then things moved with speed and finality. Small Ending Red wasp on my leg Preoccupied, I swatted – A reflex, a death. ~ S.K. Orr

Head bowed to the still Warm earth, yellow cowl, verdant Alb, lofts prayers starward.   ~ S.K. Orr

A Good Position This can’t be the designed state of things: Leaving the only serene patch of this tormented sphere in order to risk my life among texting chariot-racers, only to rush into the mine where I will pour out the best of my hours and energies to plump the wealth of someone who detests the lineage of my name, enduring the emotional incontinence of maladroits with their venom sacs of backstabbery, choking down a hurried snack and staring at the high careening clouds while praying for Time Itself to speed up, then back inside for more Masochism With Benefits, finally paroled at the magical time and then jackrabbiting my…

Trivial day is dropping in the west while the curved and fragile surfaces of eight bell peppers ring the sunset down. On a slant of guy wire, eight doves arrange the notes to moan the day’s refrains but will the worm spare my bells until I rise to watch them glisten in eight hours?   ~ S.K. Orr