Poetry By Catherine Arra

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Another Round of Daylight Saving Time

As if light or time could be saved, vacuum-sealed
in a jar on a shelf with winter provisions, as if falling 
back wouldn’t break an unhealed bone, 

as if manipulating clocks could erase memory 
outrun ennui, crush the cocoon where
we relive the past, spin a future.

Trapped in twilight, asleep by dusk, unable to bear 
too much night, I burrow into hibernation. I’m hollow.
Sleep without ache, without hunger

and remember the panorama of you, Daddy.
I loved you through all that was unholy
in the volcanic vastness of my lost girlhood.

Your eruptions punished me to an underground
you thought would tame me. I learned to understand
your backwards love, germinated and grew

with nightshades, woke in wonder of crocuses,
daffodils, greening fields, birdsong. I unfurled,
crawled into dawn, abandoned old skin to dirt. 

I forgive you.




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​Catherine Arra is the author of four full-length poetry collections and four chapbooks. Her newest work is Solitude, Tarot & the Corona Blues (Kelsay Books, 2022) A Pushcart nominee, Arra is a native of the Hudson Valley in upstate New York, where she lives with wildlife and changing seasons until winter when she migrates to the Space Coast of Florida. Arra teaches part-time and facilitates local writing groups. Find her at www.catherinearra.com