Right Kind of Nights

Angie Macri

The damask rose brought from New Orleans brimmed sweet with oil from the sweating underside of summer. Men passed inside Menard’s parlor to trade fur. Sundays, the French ate fruit and played hard maple and fir fiddles drawn with horsehair bows. Cards slapped tables. Roasting turkey met the air of snakes. The Menards ate from Chelsea iron stone. The rose bent under its own many petals and took every flood in stride, born from the blood of a young god. In the handiwork of ricochet, sun with root and river silt, a stubborn life took hold in soil and snow and hands and the right kind of nights for pecans. Husks broke to brown shells in October, long flowers pollinated by west winds from Ste. Genevieve. So breeds the cream in this forest that can last three hundred years, leaves, wood, and tempo begetting the rose and sunset’s shadow as wine in this grove.