volume seven | number one | spring 2006

Poetry

Carolyn Blount Brodersen
-- On the Bus

Collette Lawlor
-- The Diver
-- Fall

Jenn Habel
-- Us
-- Allow Me to Introduce My Bad Side

Taylor Collier
-- When He Knocks

Janet I. Buck
-- A Letter to My Sister

Linda Benninghoff
-- Voices Soft as Morning Fog
-- The Aspen

Gary Charles Wilkens
-- The Gift
-- I, Tiresias

Jenny Yang Cropp
-- stealing kimchi

 A Letter to My Sister
 -- Janet I. Buck

She had a new bottle of Nina Ricci
sitting in the dresser drawer.
After she died, you took it home;
five years later it reappeared
as my birthday gift.
I shrank from the scent --
asafetida or ether
or something behind our attic walls --
I could not think of words.

Her final days came back
in teardrops on a thank you note.
I should have called you
on this sin -- assuming her death
were a downhill path,
a wound that would close,
tissue content to be sand.
It takes longer than years
for sadness to smell of a rose.

You were the traitor to grief
and I am the one still standing
atop the Tarpeian rock.
Wind and dust whirl
around the binding ropes
and I could fall just thinking hard.
When will you learn
that days she left behind
are blue with a half-painted sky.