Summer Impression

If you were Summer, 
born so rich 
your medians are filled 
with four kinds of wildflowers: 
blue sailors, Queen Anne’s lace, 
purple clover, yellow toadflax 
(wild snapdragons also  called Butter & Eggs), 
then would you need 
a tattoo? Cut and bleed 
to heal in this humid heat? 
Born so rich 
no one to impress, 
how you dress the cynosure 
of all seasons. The others 
are either putting on or taking off, 
Winter’s poverty naked for all to see. 

L.S. Bassen is a 2011 finalist for Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award. She is also Fiction Editor for Prick of the Spindle, a(Poetry & Fiction) reviewer for Horse Less Press, Small Beer Press and winner of several awards. Over two decades her work has been published/prize-winning (poetry/fiction) in many literary magazines and zines (Kenyon Review, American Scholar, Minnetonka, Persimmontree, etc.).