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Russet

By Dick Allen

Fall apples, browning apple cores,
the mottled carcass
of an old trolley car, abandoned
deep in the forest.

What was once ambitious,
robust, rambunctious,
now burned the ruddy
color of rust,

monks’ robes, blood and dust,
faith and trust,
the russet scrape against the skin
of reddish-brown cloth.

Dick Allen's seventh collection of poems, Present Vanishing, will be published this October. He lives near the shores of Thrushwood Lake, in Trumbull, Connecticut.
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