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[ 2 poems from the winner of the
2024 Cider Press Review Book Award ]
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Partial Eclipse
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Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember. – Louise Gluck
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The morning light is dew:
soon the sun will crescent away.
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The windows of our house let
pieces of light in. Pines and oaks
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undulate in the wind. Our ground
turns yellow green in shadow.
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I remember my passage here:
from one house to another, neighbors
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who speak and those who are silent.
Black-eyed Susans fading away,
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fields turning brown in summer.
Highways leading us toward home.
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My mother is here, her suffering
a slow movement across the sun.
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I want to make a well of myself.
Find the water, cup my hands,
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ask her to drink. Turn the soil
into something soft. tell her:
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Mama, you are so clear to me—
let’s push away this swollen moon.
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Melissa McEver Huckabay
from Girl Filling the Sky, Cider Press Review, San Diego CA; © 2026
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❀ ❀ ❀
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Summer
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For Lynn
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Wasn’t our skin sticky
in the air conditioning,
wasn’t your dark hair
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smooth, your lipstick
leaving a red ring
on your wine glass? Weren’t we
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all laughing while I chopped
serrano peppers into tiny
green slits, while we poured
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more merlot? Didn’t we drink
so much that we started singing,
and didn’t you cover your mouth
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while you giggled, like you always
do? Wasn’t this just the other day,
just the other August, before the sunset
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turned bronze on South Padre,
before we all moved away,
before you walked down the aisle
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in your beaded dress, your face
gleaming and pink—
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before the hospital,
before the cancer,
before the call?
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Melissa McEver Huckabay
from Girl Filling the Sky, Cider Press Review, San Diego CA; © 2026
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❀ ❀ ❀ ❀ ❀
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What good is anything? No, this one right here. She stops beside the nature trail and points, the juicy stem tinged pink, the flowers as little like flowers as can be. What good? Will it taste like ripe berries? Cure cancer? Stop my heart beating before I finish chewing? Who knows?
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And why even care enough to answer? Although I will try. Maybe sidestep, throw in some muse about plant communities, or defer to Cherokee ethnobotany, or mumble a longish word like pollinators. What good is any of that?
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All I know is that on this morning a brief breeze rises and a dozen fairies fly. They pirouette and then they’re gone. I could tell you that just below the hill the burnweed has gone to seed. Nothing special, never any grand inflorescence, only stalky climb into light then bent brown by autumn. I could consider only that and let it go.
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But for a few seconds against the backdrop of the maple’s first red-limned transfiguration, poised on the slow transit of noon to afternoon, those airy wisps, those ephemera, those dancers winglit by sunflash — my God.
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❀
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Girl Filling the Sky is the winner of the 21st annual Cider Press Review Book Award, 2024. Melissa McEver Huckabay teaches high school English in Cypress, Texas. Her poems weave through the generations: a grandmother widowed by war, a mother scarred by deceit, a little girl abandoned by her father and forever imagining his return. And yet the warp of loss is patched and filled by the weft of love, sometimes smoldering, sometimes radiant. In the title poem, the writer is four years old and imagines she can fly from her second story balcony. Isn’t our life meant to fill the sky?
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❀ ❀ ❀ ❀ ❀
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