Shannon Wagner

VESTIGE

The diluted autumn
is tea-stained, lackluster blue.
Somewhere I want to keep July,

quiet and hidden.
The vine sours. The grapes
shrivel, pallid and freckled.
They drop to the ground like weak gunfire.

The tangled grass flexes.
An injury easily walked off.
I could set fires
to signal him out of hiding.

But I am no incendiary,
no manipulator of straw or flint.
I see Mars fade like the night's
last drop of blood.

Originally from Richlandtown, PA, Shannon Wagner currently lives in the Boston area where she's finishing her poetry thesis at Emerson College. She writes poetry reviews for Ploughshares, and her poems have appeared in The Fiddleback and Poet Lore (forthcoming).