across the path
climbing one rung to the other
my feet find their way
my son is a stranger to me
his eyes are giant pools
of wet stones.
I want him to be kind.
How can something so tall
sway and keep its balance?
The birch lean together
in their turning shade
I find the urge to
categorize everything
the names of trees and animals
what we mean
to one another
red gooseberry
red of the fruit that opens yellow
cleanly broken under a wheel
red that is swollen and spiny and ripe.
Every day you get closer to leaving me
and it is as terrifying
as finding
a cardinal wing.
“The Roots Are Horizontal Ladders” was published in the journal The Iowa Review, winter 2014.
Colby Cedar Smith holds degrees from Colorado College and Harvard University. She is the author of two chapbooks: Seven Seeds of the Pomegranate (2006) and Transplanted (2013). She has been a semi-finalist for the “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Contest, and a finalist for The Iowa Review Poetry Award, the New Letters Poetry Prize, and the Colorado Prize for Poetry, among others. Her poems have been published in Bellevue Literary Review, Harpur Palate, Memorious, Mid-American Review, Pleiades, Potomac Review, Saranac Review, Spillway, and The Iowa Review. She lives in NJ with her husband and two kids. You can read more of her work at www.colbycedarsmith.com.