UNH Today

April is National Poetry Month, and to mark the occasion UNH Today asked Master of Fine Arts candidates to share their work. Here's Dan Haislet's poem "413 E Cherry Street." Take a read or sit back and listen. Have a poem you'd like to share? Contact us at unh.today@unh.edu.  

413 E Cherry Street 

Snow begins to buzz into the sifted evening 

You remove your shoes at the door 

Billie Holiday’s album cover is orange 

She       sings beautifully 

You water the ferns in the nude 

Long curls flick your parchment skin 

You sway near the brass-colored couch 

I am the voyeur who lives inside you 

For a discount this fall 

you bought a pot of red mums 

as the colors of summer buckled 

against the descending weight of autumn 

Now our color is the orange 

of low sodium streetlights 

casting shape in a blizzard 

The mums are dead 

Inside the lights are on 

Our town 

is a dark town at night 

with an observatory on the hill 

that we could see from here 

if we had shut off the lights 

—Dan Haislet 

Published with permission of the author