Linda Parsons
Poet, playwright, essayist, and editor, Linda Parsons is the poetry editor for Madville Publishing and the copy editor for Chapter 16, the literary website of Humanities Tennessee. She is published in such journals as The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, Terrain, The Chattahoochee Review, Shenandoah, and many others. Her sixth collection, Valediction, contains poems and prose. Five of her plays have been produced by Flying Anvil Theatre in Knoxville, Tennessee.
COME, SUMMER
My father died in late summer, both of us
winter babies, our birthdays two days apart;
my mother left the next winter, months before
her 90th birthday. Their complicated force breathes
hot June breath that wilts the hydrangeas, and I
will myself to inhale it: my father’s distant refuge,
mother’s chill tongue, the walls they built then
forgot where they hid the key. I took their hands
in the nursing home, translucent with passing,
willed myself pliable finally at the end—because
we are always becoming from the invisible
seeds of the end, always leaning into summer
on the summer steps, willing jarflies to rattle
us awake to bright living.
