Saba Husain

Late December and It’s Not Cold Yet

How the wind takes the leaves
in the tallow,
sends shivers end to end,
                   then, nothing. 

Frenzied gnats suspended in a last warmth.
An airy seed’s slow progression
caught on a fern

thriving at the base of a vine
that bred inedible grapes.
Summers passed. 

There’s that place again
between this and then
punctuated by a blue jay. 

Dark circles
where you paced the lawn
relentlessly in the heat of midday.

On my knees
I clutch fistfuls of grass.
Damp soil clings to fingernails.

Wild roses, always sparse.
Cankerous stems.
The wind picking in the tallow,
                            then, nothing.

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Saba Husain is a Pakistani-American poet from Houston. Her first poetry collection, Elegy for My Tongue, will be published soon by Terrapin Books. Saba’s work appears in Cimarron Review, Barrow Street, Sequestrum, Arc Poetry, On the Seawall, The Aleph Review, Bangalore Review, Bellevue Review, Texas Review, Dallas Review, Natural Bridge, Glass Poetry, Jaggery, Missing Slate and elsewhere, and is forthcoming in Puerto del Sol and Third Coast. She was a finalist for the 2023 Perugia Press Prize, the 2021 and 2020 X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize and won the 2022 Hot Poet’s Spring Equinox Poetry Contest and the 2014 Lorene Pouncey Award at Houston Poetry Fest. Saba studied Creative Writing at University of Houston. She holds a day job and serves on the board of Mutabilis Press.