We carry autumn apples by the basket

to the back porch & peel. We slice flesh,
red & pink & yellow. I am apple in your
hand, wait to peel, flowers of forgotten

slabs of skin. On this snow-doomed day
with sky as low as the lake, we think
it will never storm. Unfurled apples &

skins tell what we shed to be here.
Perfumed by wild smoke we slice the sky
& distractions of the moon. A woodpecker

leans into a tree, rattling. We breathe
this clarity of the shattered sky.
We are so deep we find captions

hidden in the time it takes the sycamores
to fling their cold questions into night.

She names herself after the snow

At the end of McIntosh season she names
herself after the snow, walks her sorrel mare
across frozen soil on once-turned earth.

The oversized machinery can’t touch this side
of the acre. They stride the broad verge which
unrolls to smudged skyline. The northern wind

slices her jeans, invisible kintsugi.
She loves even the deerflies who zipper snowless
sky with their sharp zen bites, tenuous

tissue of the day as it loses color
to night, the farrows narrow into dark.
She calls herself after the snow,

with precise sense of time, as each flake
falls into its own path. When the
sky wills it, & the pines stand bereft,
the lucent sky is all she takes with her.

Lynn Finger’s writings have appeared in 8Poems, Perhappened, Book of Matches, Fairy Piece, and Drunk Monkeys, and are forthcoming from Anti-Heroin Chic. She was nominated for the 2021 Best of the Net Anthology. Lynn edits Harpy Hybrid Review and works with a group that mentors writers in prison. Her Twitter handle is @sweetfirefly2