When I looked at the September calendar, I noticed the Autumn Equinox is on the 22nd. The first thing I thought of was being told as a kid that an egg can only be balanced on its end during an equinox due to a special alignment of the Sun and Earth during the equinox that creates a unique gravitational pull that stabilizes the egg. It is a myth. You can balance an egg on its end on any day of the year. The equinox has zero effect on gravity or an egg's physical properties.
My second thought was about poems concerning equinoxes and balance.
In her poem "Equinox," Elizabeth Alexander uses late-September imagery to reflect on the nature of life and mortality. The energy of the changing season, when "bees are wild and eccentric" as they fly during the last warm days of autumn.
Poems exploring balance often depict it as a delicate, active effort rather than a static state, using physical objects or shifting landscapes to mirror our inner lives.
In our model poem, "Balance" by Alice B. Fogel, from her collection Elemental, she doesn't define balance as calm or symmetry. She defines it as survival.
Balance is everything, is the only way to hold on.
But not holding on in the way we usually mean it. Not a safe grip, but a hover.
I've weighed the alternatives, the hold
as harbor: It isn't safe
to let go. But consider the hover,
choices made, the moment
between later and too late.
Balance is that suspended state: choices made, the moment between later and too late.
Consider how these other two balance poems define it: Balance by Adam Zagajewski, and "Balance" by Dorianne Laux.
Balance is not a static achievement but a momentary alignment, something we pass through, notice, and learn from. We don’t “arrive” at balance and stay there; we glimpse it. A period where work and rest feel proportionate, where inner life and outer obligations match pace, where identity feels neither shadowed nor overexposed. These moments are real but fleeting, and that doesn’t make them less meaningful.
Balance can be physical, like the equinox, an egg, learning to ride a bicycle, or a woman on a tightrope at the circus. In poems, it is more often internal, such as balancing a relationship, life and work, or our emotions. Sometimes, a poem contains both, with one reflecting on the other.
For September, we are seeking poems that focus on some time of balance.
SUBMISSION DEADLINE: September 30, 2026
Alice B. Fogel is a former theatrical costumer and clothing refashioner who earned a BA in art and literature from Antioch College and an MFA in poetry from the University of New Hampshire.
She is the author of Interval: Poems Based on Bach’s “Goldberg Variations," which won the Nicholas Schaffner Award for Music in Literature and the 2016 New Hampshire Literary Award in Poetry; and Be That Empty.
Fogel lives in Walpole, New Hampshire; works as a professor and one-on-one as an academic coach with neurodiverse students at Landmark College in Putney, Vermont; and hikes mountains whenever possible.
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