- Steve Gerson
The Widow's Window
The evening light, more gray than dusk yellow,
filtering through cracked windowpanes as dust,
cast shadows on her threadbare dress like faded
bones. She rested one hand on the chilled sill,
the other on her brow bowed low. Outside,
her farm’s fallow fields dimmed in the November
nightfall, the air breathless as a shuttered cellar,
canned goods lined cobwebbed like tombstones.
The route from 46, Bandera to Blanco,
passed without a glance, she a postscript, a postcard
never delivered. A mongrel cur, one ear clipped
like a bus ticket collected, trudged down the weed-strewn
road wending toward her home and wandered off like
a memory. Looking up, she saw the night’s last light fade.
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