Take a right at the worn clapboards

your palm finds the crease it knows

gather up a summer of dust

haptic chatter with the afternoon.

Recall steps paced with breaths

a picket fence becomes your guide

bowed staves, musty sweet

pass you to the buckled street—

to stink weed in the sidewalks split

the pithy prick of a rose tendril

papery licks of hydrangea leaves

the exhaling of the linden's hill.

Surrender to the slope ahead

where houses stagger, catch their step

where wet paint scents the rooted path

and hostas smother the corner green.

Turn here at the dogwood's end

to brush along wrought iron spines

flecked and bent in unkempt surrender

draws you down a crooked line—

to church yard mums which suffocate

the gritty hour caught in the throat

broken stones stump your feet

and juniper bristles sprawl and reach.

Map again this tapestry

followed with a sensuous pace,

map again this tapestry

Tap step. Tap step. Tap.

Darren Black resides on Massachusetts North Shore where he works as a vocational counselor. He continues to hone his poetic skills in workshops and studied in the Vermont College MFA program in the 1990's. Darren hopes that a bit of queer sensibility and irony touches everything he writes. His first published poem appeared in the fall 2019 issue of the Muddy River Poetry Review. His recent poems explore disability status, accessibility, and his own experiences as a person living with blindness.