POETRY

Finalist for the 2025 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize Honoring Jake Adam York

Autumnal Poem with War in It

By Heather Jessen     VOLUME 58 No. 3

Vertical Divider

The ground’s gussied up as the trees, half-dressed,
do a slow tease and drop their magnificence
into the acrobatic wind, the air now kinetic,
a kaleidoscope of yellow to orange to red.

You walk through the swirling eddies, nod
to the couple shooting selfies—a dog, unleashed,
ignites a toddler’s cry—and imagine every
fourth building gone. Bye library. Bye

school. Bye fire station. Bye offices, parks.
In the country you’d be farewelling fields,
groves, barns, markets, and everywhere—homes.
Your mind refuses to add the people dead.

Instead, displaced. The women in the photos
look like you, except younger and different
garb. Displaced, cousin to misplaced as if
we’re all forgotten wallets waiting to be found.

In place of all that gone: new geographies
of rubble, mountains of decimated and destroyed,
the air lanced with dust and char, nothing like
the vacant lot you grew up next to, now

a hospital the neighbors didn’t want built. You keep
walking, finding no answers. Above, the wind
ignores the sun and clouds battling for the day
and catapults each leaf into cartwheel and waltz.

Inside, the ruin of your thoughts. You capture
a flare of whirling, phoenix-like detritus
and tuck that leaf, a gold-veined crimson relic,
into your pocket, and soldier—or pilgrim—on.



•     •     •


TO READ MORE POETRY, PICK UP A COPY OF VOL 58 No. 3




HEATHER JESSEN has poems appearing in Beloit Poetry Journal, Jabberwock Review, and elsewhere, is a finalist for the Mississippi Review and Charles Simic poetry prizes, and is a recipient of the Sweet Lit Poetry Prize. A former resident of Australia, she lives in Connecticut, where she’s a curator of the Sleeping Giant Reading Series, a reader for The Adroit Journal, and can be sporadically found on Instagram at @maxhj1.


VOLUME 58 No. 3