Lean out of this convention
of age with your coffee, your
blue humor and your explanation.
I might even back up and laugh.
I got here, too, you know, scouring
each Kodak black and white
for a date and a reason in logical
monochrome.

I’m fine, if you ask. I can still smile
at the joke of sky blue pink. I knew
this was coming and try not to worry
that after a lifetime of every shade
of dissent, all I am left with is fuschia
and the shadow

under our chestnut tree, still relevant,
but pointing east now. As if that direction
is a clue, a planchette moved by the sun
before the sky goes salmon and shouts
no such luck, my friend.

Selected byNolcha Fox
Image credit:Diego PH

Sara Clancy is a Philadelphia transplant to the Southwest.  Her chapbook Ghost Logic won the 2017 Turtle Island Quarterly Editors Choice Award. Among other places, her poems have appeared in Off the Coast, The Linnet's Wings, Crab Creek Review, The Madison Review, Misfit Magazine, Avatar Review and Verse Wisconsin. She lives in the desert with her husband, their dog, two ordinary cats and a psychotic cross-eyed one.