Where I live, Autumn waits.

She is a traveling girl, skinny, with Jolene's
red hair and a clove cigarette in her white mouth.

Her eyes are the green of a freshly-snapped twig,
and she wears blue jeans and halter tops, showing off
the peachy freckles on her shoulders.

She dislikes the dust in the air, and fighting Summer for her place.

But she comes every year, because she has to, and it's always a not-enough
stay in a trashy hotel.

She walks silently in the orange mornings,
and her breath is on the early breeze.

She needs no constant attention from the world around her.
No outside validation can come close to the truth of her simple,
powerful beauty.

She lingers, sighing in the hot afternoon,
pulling the moon from the horizon and shining it's light
back to the sun.

Autumn is exasperated in the desert. I hear her crunching
footsteps and the ringing flicker of her lighter. Taking another
drag and letting the wind run it's cooling fingers in her hair.

Winter is never as patient as I can be, she says with a grin.

In other places, green and lively, she takes less offense and compassionately
brings her golden death upon them; basking graciously in their honor.
The coldest burning fire, as a gift for taking life.

But in the desert, she shares a reluctant spotlight with a bouncing girl;
whose cupcake tits and shorts she brazenly pulls out of her ass, become tiresome and
garish, in the too-long heat of the day.

Autumn sighs. She stays because she knows better. She knows
the yearning grows at Summer's bleached peak, while the world
gets sick on cotton candy and suntan lotion.

And it is the silent begging that she loves the most. The pleading
on sweaty brows. The indulgent chaos of letting the sun stay
too long.

In the desert. In the dust, where cold is a precious novelty, Autumn waits.

10/08/2021

Author's Note: Finally, it's going to cool down.

Posted on 10/08/2021
Copyright © 2024 Maria Kintner