Southern Humanities Review, Vol. 58 No. 4, December 2025

First published in Southern Humanities Review, Vol. 58, No. 4, December 2025 and nominated for a Pushcart Prize 2026

Liquid amber trees

glow in autumn, globular pods spiked
with eerie lantern emptiness. The flesh of the fruit has faded

and casks of wooden spur remain, strangely charming,
but the leaves are flame. They’ve glad and torched the green

from their own star bodies. They are a riot in celebration
of lack, loss yet to come and in turn, the return

that will follow, like the father who fumes, backfiring
the car as he peels from the driveway.

We all know he will come back, act himself again.
His rage, only a season which crumbles to dust, to infertile soil

to be forgotten, blown clear away, forgiven by the gorgeousness
of his smile. The April sun lights his head from behind,

his gentleness like slow amber
bleeding after a branch is broken. He brushes my knotted hair

with the patience of liquid becoming crystalline. In the sunlight
he is jubilant, his back slick as a whale in the pool;


he breaches, launches me by my foot into the glee of antigravity,
an extension of him, a splash.

Only rarely and in the umbral light
of evening does gray smoke gather around his temples.

I don’t know why he smoldered. If it was guilt or grieving
as we all grieve our lives as they pass

turning from tender, fuzzed, green glistening succulence
to a certain flammable dryness, cracked, laden

with worry for winter, our boughs gilded and heaving in knowledge.
We are not the liquid amber tree, but grasping creatures.

I don’t blame him for his golden madness,
the way he longed to run molten, uncontained.