To start again each year, looking back at one’s life before moving ahead, requires clarity. To start again while grieving may require more courage than one has. Cohen’s spare poem passes through the disorientation of loss from “the first autumn…without her” to the following summer, season of abundance and decay. —Jody Bolz, Poetry Editor
THE NEW YEAR
It always came
with a cake
she’d made—
a cake made
with honey.
The first autumn
that came with-
out her came
with three cakes
friends had made—
leaden weights I
could not taste.
Days came with
deadening layers
of sameness
day upon day
until summer,
when I stumbled into
a stranger’s garden,
where a honey
bee stung me,
and how sudden
and sweet to be
reminded that
still this world
has wings.
Andrea Cohen’s eighth poetry collection is The Sorrow Apartments (Four Way Books, 2024). A new book, Sugar, will be out in early 2026. Cohen directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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