Gregory Loselle
Late March is heartbreak. Snow or rain
And sun again. And then snow, as winter
Gasps and staggers, sinks to its knees
In the stiff brown grass, melts down
To gray patch-pockets in the hollows
Under the shrubs, along the shaded sides
Of buildings. All winter’s trash arises,
Thawing out of frozen ground, and drifts
Like sooty leaves freed to call back fall.
The morning’s still a twilight dark
An hour before dawn as a shadow scatters
Salt in a blackened asphalt lot, sprays
White crystals into the thinning dark,
Spreads caution ahead of the coming day.
***
Gregory Loselle has won four Hopwood Awards at The University of Michigan, where he earned an MFA. He has won The Academy of American Poets Prize, the William van Wert Fiction Award from Hidden River Arts, and The Ruby Lloyd Apsey Award for Playwriting. He was the winner of the 2009 Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition, The Robert Frost Award of The Robert Frost Foundation, and the Rita Dove Prize for poetry (where he won both First Prize and an Honorable Mention) at Salem College. He has won multiple awards in the Poetry Society of Michigan’s Annual Awards Competition. His first chapbook, Phantom Limb, was published in 2008, and another, Our Parents Dancing, in 2010, both from Pudding House Press. Two more, The Whole of Him Collected, and About the House, were published by Finishing Line Press in 2012 and 2013 respectively. His short fiction has been featured in the Wordstock and Robert Olen Butler Competition anthologies, as well as in The Saturday Evening Post, and The Metro Times of Detroit, and his poetry has appeared in The Ledge, Oberon, The Comstock Review, Rattle, The Georgetown Review, River Styx, The Spoon River Poetry Review, The Pinch, Alehouse, Poetry Nook, Sow’s Ear, and online in The Ambassador Poetry Project, among others.