Gregory Loselle
Here somewhere its clipped descant
chants from a hidden corner where
an oil-stain mooring spilled crumbs
of fertilizer—a further dark inside
the corner-twilight—tips October’s afternoon
toward night. Perhaps it’s only right
a cricket sings long past its season into fall
and yellowing light, past slow-advancing
dawns and latent nights. Something
must continue, some one thing contrive
to linger on beyond its time to draw
us back from our forgetfulness, to say
there was a summer once, here. So: a metaphor
is singing in the garage—but let that go.
Say only that a cricket has contrived
to outlive summer for a month or so.
***
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.