November Sixth
by Zoe Boyer
It’s no solace that November’s
glacial light has polished the morning
to a silvered gleam—the sun has risen
over countless terrible things,
made mirrors of autumn’s floods, burned
scarlet through the smoking scrub,
pierced rifts in the rubble, glazed
the brows of men bloated on glory at the
helms of our wayward nations. I suppose
the numbers say this place is only
half terrible—half beautiful and half
terrible like two faces of the same coin,
two hemispheres of the same world, one
in shadow, the other struck radiant by
the day's first glancing sun. I know I should
lose my mind over the coppered oaks,
the gilded locusts, but the bombs keep
falling and for every sweet thing, a gun.
Zoe Boyer was raised on the shore of Lake Michigan. She completed her MA in creative writing among the ponderosas in northern Arizona, and now lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Her work has appeared in such publications as The New York Times, The Penn Review, Terrain.org, Pleiades, and Poetry South. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and selected as a finalist for Best of the Net.
