You make me want to use month
as a verb. Take you somewhere warm,
where oranges are evergreen. It’s obscene
to think of all the wholesome things we
could do together: ride out bad weather on
wooden porches, light garden torches
and read by firelight. Fill cups with
sunsets and drink them in, cocktails
chilled with wisps of widdershins winds.
And, at night, fall asleep in October—
cased in only cracking, creaking wood:
a loud house in a quiet country
snapping and popping among
the low drone of bees. Tell each other
all the quiet lies: that we didn’t waste
time waiting to waste this time. That
we can plan to month again and
again. That if you drive fast enough,
you can get anywhere in a day.
October
B.A. Van Sise is an author and photographic artist focused on the intersection between language and the visual image. He is the author of two monographs: the visual poetry anthology Children of Grass: A Portrait of American Poetry with Mary-Louise Parker, and Invited to Life: After the Holocaust with Neil Gaiman, Mayim Bialik, and Sabrina Orah Mark. He has previously been featured in solo exhibitions at the Center for Creative Photography, the Center for Jewish History and the Museum of Jewish Heritage, and numerous group exhibitions; a number of his portraits of American poets are in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. His short nonfiction and poetry have been featured extensively in an array of literary magazines, and he has been a finalist for the Rattle Poetry Prize, the Travel Media Awards for feature writing, and the Meitar Award for Excellence in Photography. He is a 2022 New York State Council on the Arts Fellow in Photography, a Prix de la Photographie Paris award-winner, a winner of the Lascaux Prize for Nonfiction, and an Independent Book Publishers Awards gold medalist.