with their glowing rows of ripe apples like a realm
that might offer salvation. Bring on the children
playing in the schoolyard at recess, how they stay
the same age every year. I praise that potent youth.
With rosy cheeks, they zigzag through tall grass,
letting their jackets slip and puddle to the ground,
abandoned for the thrill of the chase. When
they leave this wide, open field, their faces
fresh but newly fraught, their parents will wake
worried in the night, remembering their own
adolescence—reckless, indulgent, their choices so often
flying in the face of mortality. And haven’t we all
survived more than our fair share of close calls? Oh,
we were alive on Friday nights, spiking our Polar Pops
on the way to the football game. The lived-in
smell of a little red sedan. Those old windows
we manually rolled up and down. How that extra
effort made the wind fresher. But haven’t I stumbled
out of a car’s backseat packed with more bodies
than seatbelts, the driver’s breath a sweet fume
of booze. And don’t I know the feel of black water
rocking a pontoon boat, out of gas beneath a night
sky pinpricked with lights we couldn’t decipher
to paddle our way home. Did I, back then,
still harbor this ache in my chest? Existential,
the way it disappears in warm weather but returns
with a vengeance in fall. I’ve heard it called seasonal
depression, but if anything, I’ve come to believe
summer just manifests as seasonal denial. Listen
to the black birds clustered in the tree, how they sing
together like a church choir. And don’t I know
it’s Sunday morning? Don’t I know where I should be.
All the bread I’ve broken. All the wine I’ve drunk.
Whether or not I believed in my parents’ church,
in their version of salvation. There are traditions
and seasons I will never understand. Still,
none of it was for nothing. It all brought me here.
Mary Ardery is the author of Level Watch (June Road Press, September 2025). Her poems appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, Best New Poets, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. The recipient of a Lifelong Arts Fellowship from the Indiana Arts Commission, she was born and raised in Bloomington and now lives in West Lafayette. You can visit her online at maryardery.com.