Pay attention to your heat, your survival— the tree rooted in your garden is a sequined vernacular, a cashmere sweater. Because nothing matters in the end but comfort and the bending light. Summer says, I will be the room you die in. You will dream, neither of regret, nor in the language you were born into. A stranger will comb your existential threads. You had thought, for instance, humans were gerunds or harps bent on playing in a diner that serves black coffee and hard donuts. You ask, What is the past? What is it all for? Summer says, the wound of being untaught. Says, hungry. Says, the cypress is a hospice, says, falter, falter, falter, bloom bloom bloom.
Doris Ferleger is a winner of the New Letters Poetry Songs of Eretz Prize, Montgomery County Poet Laureate Prize, Robert Fraser Poetry Prize, and the AROHO Creative Non-Fiction Prize, among others. Her work has been published in numerous journals. She holds an MFA in Poetry and a PhD in Psychology and maintains a mindfulness-based therapy practice in Wyncote, PA.
