Weather Report
Caroline Maun
The leaf filled with rainwater
so still that from the porch
it looks like a silver dollar.
When you ask her to pick it up
she lifts the teacup it makes,
pours out the liquid mirror,
showing you what it is.
Tomorrow, the sun will rise
over the ship’s highway
until you close the blinds to it
in self-defense. Too much
light will bolt the spinach,
turn currant tomatoes the color
of bricks. It’s so airless still
you will take a paintbrush
to the squash blossoms
to coax their fruit.
Ravaged onions lie
in tangles with spent
chives, seeds spilling
like hourglass sand.
What you’ll miss
the most, you think,
will be the spiraling pair
of cabbage moths
pirouetting in abandon
above all that lies below.
Caroline Maun is an associate professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. She teaches creative writing and American literature and is the Chair. Her poetry publications include the volumes The Sleeping (Marick Press, 2006), What Remains (Main Street Rag, 2013), and three chapbooks, Cures and Poisons and Greatest Hits, both published by Puddinghouse Press, and Accident, published by Alice Greene & Co. Her poetry has appeared in The Bear River Review, The MacGuffin, Third Wednesday, Peninsula Poets, and Eleven Eleven, among other places.