The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Uncertain Acrobats by Rebecca Hart Olander

This selection, chosen by Guest Curator Kirsten Kowalewski, is from Uncertain Acrobats by Rebecca Hart Olander released by CavanKerry Press in 2021.

Calling Song

Walking accompanied by the soundtrack of summer’s end:
single leaf falling, squirrels in the underbrush, unseen
as they blend with the gray of last year’s leaves,
and the thrum of insects in the greenery,
bushes shimmering with sound, a trilling
that isn’t cricket, peeper, or bird.

Back home, my search-bar questions find articles of answers:
“The Sound of August: Jar Fly? Cicada? or Locust?”
and “What Bug’s Creating All That Late Summer Buzz?”
The buzz, it seems, is the annual cicada hatching,
the Tibicen lyricen calling song,
every year new and alive in its short living.

His old voice is still on the machine:
Hi there, Becky, Dad here. Then the birthday song,
curling out the to you in vibrato to make it last longer,
and it does last, but of course it’s also gone.

Rebecca Hart Olander’s poetry has appeared recently in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Jet Fuel Review, The Massachusetts Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and elsewhere, and her collaborative visual and written work has been published in multiple venues online and in They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). Rebecca’s books include a chapbook, Dressing the Wounds (dancing girl press, 2019), and her debut full-length collection, Uncertain Acrobats (CavanKerry Press, 2021), which was given a “Must Read” distinction from the Massachusetts Center for the Book as a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award. Rebecca teaches writing at Westfield State University and Amherst College and works with poets in the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Wilkes University. She is the editor/director of Perugia Press.

Kirsten Kowalewski is the editor for online horror fiction review resource Monster Librarian. She has an MLS and a specialist certificate in school library media from Indiana University, has worked as a children’s librarian and elementary school media specialist, and is a lifelong reader.