I WON’T SPEAK OF MY LEAVING TO ANYONE

This fall, no frost on the fields—how long is the line

between departure and arrival? In the south, the sky

flourishes as if there is another dimension of the heart,

one tended to without being pared back or pruned, branches

tracing a rib-vault ceiling. Even north and south don’t mean

what they once did, when you could tape a map to the wall

and count each latitude. Instead, a constant tilt either toward

or away from springtime, snow’s sudden vanish into the earth.

Hannah Kroonblawd is a PhD student at Illinois State University. She is often over-watering her peace lily and watching Chinese rom-coms. A graduate of the MFA program at Oregon State University, her recent work can be found in the Blue Earth Review, Radar Poetry, and Ruminate, among others.