In the Darkness

When I called you
I wore a yellow shirt

Not my color but I had grown
tired of darkness

In the closet roof rats
were chewing through the rafters

so my choices were limited

You wrote texting is better
I did not reply better for what

It hadn’t rained for two months 

Dust thou art and to dust
my father taught me

You used to wear cerulean
why switch to black?

In mourning for the world
you intone

In the early morning
I picked lemons

Carol Dorf is a Zoeglossia fellow. Her writing has been published in three chapbooks, and in journals that include “Great Weather for Media,” “The Mom Egg,” “Aybss and Apex,” ”Unlikely Stories,” “About Place,” “Slipstream,” “The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics,” “Scientific American,” and “Maintenant.” She is the founding poetry editor of Talking Writing.