Komorebi
by Francesca Leader
Here I am, burning my one effulgent free hour at a driveway banquet of unwanted goods, listening to a sad woman in a Sag Harbor T-shirt talk of grandkids she never sees because her son’s wife hates her, and how she’s moving to Costa Rica because your dollar goes so much farther there, and nobody visits anyway so why pay taxes on four bedrooms, even as I study, through sunglass scrim, the interplay of komorebi with the varicose veins on her blue-white calves, perhaps trying to parse why I stopped by her sign when I already knew she had nothing I desired, or why I ask how much for the microwave, which she says is twenty because it’s brand new never used didn’t fit her kitchen, or why I hand her the only two bucks I’ve got in cash for a box of yellowed blank greeting cards with kittens and roses, and tell her, in parting, my real name, through all this aware of the longing—like light through the leaves—to snuff your buttermilk neck, and nip the sweet chantarelles of your earlobes, but aware, too, of the rapture—the cooling shadow—of existing in this moment, and nowhere else, knowing I’d better love what I’m doing—whatever that is—because it may be the last thing I ever do.
Francesca Leader is a self-taught, Pushcart-nominated writer originally from Western Montana. She has poetry published or forthcoming in the Sho Poetry Journal, Frost Meadow Review, Door is a Jar, Stanchion, Nixe’s Mate, Streetcake, Bullshit Lit, Cutbow Quarterly, Literary Mama, and elsewhere. Learn more about her work at inabucketthemoon.wordpress.com