As soon as the rain pauses, I’m out the door. Left-right-left-right. The rocking rhythm instantly soothes my troubled psyche in this rain-soaked run-up to the winter of our discontent.

I shudder to look directly in front of me at the fraught future of us all.

So I look up at the gray sky with its scribbles of bare tree branches. I look down into the alternative worlds of pothole puddles. That wet universe, somehow both subterranean and full of sky, exerts a powerful pull.

With dampened hope, I prepare to check our mailbox, locked to foil thieves and vandals.

overhead—
a raven’s raspy 
commentary 

Bio: Sheila Sondik