The Apostrophe Blog
Photo by Martin Vorel
In Fall 2014, two of my poems were published in the very excellent print journal, Gold Man Review out of Salem, Oregon: “An Elegy for Alice Who Called Out of the Blue on Her 54th Birthday in April 2010, Said She Was ‘Tying Up Loose Ends’ before Heading into a Period of Major Surgeries, and Died a Brief Eighteen Months Later of Complications from a Recurring Infection” and “And I will tell you a story.” The latter also appeared as the opening poem in my poetry collection, Every Door Recklessly Ajar.
Gold Man Review is an annual literary journal that serves and supports its community of authors who all reside on the West Coast. They believe that “Creativity Becomes Community” and that “artists are vital and there is an ongoing need to continue and further education in the arts.”
Here is the first of my Gold Man Review poems:
An Elegy for Alice Who Called Out of the Blue on Her 54th Birthday
in April 2010, Said She Was “Tying Up Loose Ends” Before Heading
into a Period of Major Surgeries, and Died a Brief Eighteen Months
Later of Complications from a Recurring Infection
There is no one behind the curtain, able to fix, eager to mend.
Even with the eggs at room temperature, sometimes you beat the whites
and they still won’t peak.
All those fields—rutabaga, tomato, turnip—that once filled
the no man’s land between
the dike and your backyard fence,
gone like you,
victory gardens ceded to asphalt,
to a trail of B.B.s, cigarette butts, beer cans,
the ubiquitous plastic bag snagged and waving from a branch
to two girls, motherless.
Our river’s edge.
According to the moon, the day you died was the best
for picking above-ground crops.
You, one of the ripe ones.
You, lost before the upper limb of the sun lifted above the horizon, 6:44 A.M.
A day of no rainfall or gusts, ten hours and seven minutes of light.
Interests: Reading, writing, not arithmetic. The art and craft of poetry. Photography. Vegetable and flower gardening especially heirloom bulbs and dahlias. Movies in real theatres. Theatre on real stages. Art in real galleries. Crossword puzzles and, of course, Wordle. Singer-songwriters like Aimee Mann and Patti Griffin. All kinds of music especially 1930s jazz. Venice, Italy! The Dude abides.
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