He is a boy, perhaps fourteen. A boy in Florence, just before the city lights the evening. The air is scented with rinsed pavement. The boy sprints down the sidewalk. At the streetlamp he vaults, grasps the post one-handed, and spins to round the corner. A grey man in a grey coat turns to watch him spring onto a park bench, feather step its length, and bound away.

bells pealing
from the duomo tower
an explosion of wings

Marion Starling Boyer’s

Ice Hours was selected for the 2021 Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize and will be released January 2023 from Michigan State University Press. She is the author of The Sea Was Never Far, The Clock of the Long Now, and Composing the Rain, winner of Grayson Books’ Poetry Chapbook competition. Her work’s been nominated for Pushcarts, the Lenore Marshall Award, and the Best of the Net anthology. Recent work has been published by Modern Haiku, Comstock Review, Pedestal Magazine, Grey Sparrow, Rabbit, Dalhousie Review, and The Orchards Poetry Review.

A professor emeritus for Kalamazoo Valley Community College, Boyer served on the executive board for Kalamazoo’s Poetry Festival, as well as the planning committee for Lit Youngstown’s Literary Festival, and conducts workshops for Lit Youngstown and Lit Cleveland. She lives in Twinsburg, Ohio, famous for its world-record gathering of twins every summer.

For more, see author’s website: www.marionstarlingboyer.com