Erin Wilson – Innisfree Poetry Journal

The Beginning of Winter

At the end of the day (just after 9 PM),

after our dinner and our show together on the couch,

after I check e-mails and submission prompts,

and he reads Dostoevsky beneath the thrift store light,

he walks me to my room and we kiss goodnight

(having become that couple — in love —

but old enough to sleep more soundly apart).

He pours me into my bedclothes and closes my door.

I sit on my knees in bed for a moment, a mattress upon the floor.

We're past middle age and have little security to show.

As I sit in silence, letting my sight go,

a truth ducks beneath some black-green boughs

in the distance, and makes its way toward me

as though on snowshoes.

Erin Wilson is the author of At Home with Disquiet (Circling Rivers, 2020) and a second collection, the forthcoming Blue ((Circling Rivers, 2022). Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Channel Magazine, The Honest Ulsterman, South Carolina Review, CV2, and in numerous other publications and anthologies internationally. She lives in a small town on Robinson-Huron Treaty territory in Northern Ontario, the traditional lands of the Anishnawbek.

The Beginning of Winter

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