Autumn Hayes

Welcome to the Atomic Blog! This being the first post, it seems fitting to begin with new poetry. So here’s this link to a contemporary sonnet that I wrote and read a few weeks ago. The visual version just dropped on Angelique Jamail’s blog, Sappo’s Torque, and I want to send big thanks to her and everyone at Mutabilis Press for helping me find and share these words. This poem represents a fresh start for me, in my life and in my poetry, and their invitations to read and publish it mean a lot.

For starters, this is the first sonnet I’ve written in the 21st century. The last one I even attempted, I scribbled in the blank book my father gave me for my 18th birthday. Well, blank except for quotes by powerful women. That was back before we knew how Y2K was going to turn out. It was also a sonnet about writing a sonnet. Let’s not talk about that anymore, m’kay.

This new poem came to me as I walked along the bayou by my house the day before the reading. Completely unprepared and excited to figure things out, I bounced along with a joy I hadn’t experienced in years. I certainly hadn’t expected it when I woke up that morning. Like everyone else, I’ve had a rocky past two years of distance and restriction. What felt like loss on loss piled up until it was hard to see anything clearly, much less all the things I’d truly gained. Plus, I’ve spent most of my life as a poet (including that long-ago sonnet about writing a sonnet) exploring pain, loss, betrayal, discrimination, abandonment, and other fun traumas.

So when I found myself bopping along the bayou, mentally writing a poem that gave my heart permission to feel good, I almost stopped walking and looked for a mirror. Who was this rhyming and unconcerned what anyone would think of it? Who was this letting her mind dance and following it wherever it led her? Was this me falling open to all my first love, writing, had to offer? Me???

I hope you enjoy this poem as much as I enjoyed writing it / letting it come to me. Feel free to let me know what you think in the comments. There’s more news coming soon, and it’s exciting to feel like my own personal revolution is finally taking off.