sonnet for another season
from issue Number 1, Summer 2009
by James Stotts

persephone, don’t you think it’s you who’ve taught me
this deadening lack, or logic of desire?
when leaves fall and the black waves break down
they’re reaching out for you
when seasons reduce green flesh to a deathgrip in the briar
when the fields are razed and bodies buried like seeds

all things lie in wait for you as long as they know how
but, impatient, climb back out of sleep transformed
pale venus prevents you and jealously mistakes the harvest
leaving a dumb hunger in your ambulance

your eyes so sloe—almond, gimlet, doe—revised
      with dew
no storm can delight the starlings from the hawthorn’s arms
tonight, nor startle me from your side
but come spring, among the crouching grass and milkweed,
      no man recalls you

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About the Author
James Stotts started writing poetry and making his own books when he was nine or ten, and won several statewide high school poetry competitions in New Mexico before publishing his first widely-circulated poem in Hanging Loose at age eighteen. His poetry, translation, and opinion has appeared (or is appearing) lately in 1913, Pusteblume, Action Yes, Galatea Resurrects, Reconfigurations, Circumference, and The Atlantic on-line. [blog]