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Fernwood Press, 2026

Sky Over explores a sister’s ache over the loss of her older brother, with a love that transcends their relationship troubled by growing up with an abusive mother. These poems were inspired by Patricia Fargnoli’s poem about clouds and the ephemeral nature of life, “Winter Sky Over Cheshire County, New Hampshire.”

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With words that reach out like wings, Lana Hechtman Ayers’s new book Sky Over will lift and carry you. This brave and loving book reaches across the boundaries not just of history, regret, and silence, but of time and space, life and death. Through these vivid poems to her late brother Alan, and through one beautiful and poignant message spoken in Alan’s voice, Ayers powerfully proves that we may “love each other alive.” This book will hearten you, for in these deftly woven poems she brings us close to our longed-for horizons. Here we find renewed connection, forgiveness, and the chance to love again.
—Annie Lighthart, author of Pax

Above them, you fly up, dove-gray for miles.
Or so I imagine your end—escape velocity,
rocketing you from earth’s atmosphere back
into the volatile universe that birthed us, Brother,
that atom-less void before time ticked,
before water and wind kissed and made breath,
before the red sled of a fox treading ice,
before my Buddhist teacher, Jane, instructed me
that consciousness is a window seat in hell.
What is love but a squall of fog one hopes
never clears, a cautionary field of migrant
workers who rarely taste the fruits they labor over?
Are we more than stains on the never-ending
imagination of God? Tell me, Brother, what death
is not so I may taste these seeded clouds as seasoning
in life’s bitter broth, and the dreams I dream
for tomorrow may still amount to more than plague
crows plunging into earth’s Seven Seas.