Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine #16

Don’t Ever Let Go—Not Until They Make You These days I read all the self—help articles and walk every day and get plenty of sleep and eat peas and red beans, always trying for more.

This is how it is in the kind of world where hope is an idea that needs holding on to, needs building up by each one of us, for whatever is needed, light or water, earth or air.

This is how I have built up a way for me now to grow older and keep steady day to day.

This is the way, trying to hold the morning in my hands at daybreak, keeping my eyes keen, looking out for bees and hummingbirds, and I am learning to be in love with ease, doing exactly what I know how to do in the physical world, surviving in the ruins of old loves, cheaters, the silence at the other end of the phone when I need to really talk to a friend.

Tomorrow I plan to transplant a cache of little aloe plants into small clay pots, and this will mean no matter what lies surround me, there is a garden, a new life, starting up from out of nothing at all.

And when I write under the full moon about love coming around again, it sticks as if showing up in the poem it takes on a real narrative on of its own, well-scripted, easily dreamt, all become part of short walks into the night under the stars and the blackness in a desert in earth changes in a tough time.

I am learning to make a go of it this way, with less, accepting so much conditional love as it is, taking to what comes back no matter what is lost, orange rose buds on an old rose bush out back breaking open, wild, nearly voluptuous with life, and I know in the moment this is as good as it gets, watching the palm leaves sway overhead over and over as I sway along with them, what blooms in its way and everyday I am watching for them to show up again and again, dressed in my blue cotton shirt the color of the sky. It is magic.

Charlene Langfur Charlene Langfur is a self-described organic gardener, rescued dog advocate, Syracuse University Graduate Writing Fellow, and LGBTQ senior. Her poems frequently appear in Weber—The Contemporary West, Inkwell, and North Dakota Quarterly.