In the 1870s Half-white, half-black, she wears a clean straw hat, ribbon died deep lavender and a couple of roses poised. Still, her lips below broad nose, and solemn, her brown eyes wide with song as the pastor extols the continuing good of Jesus revived from His cross. High pale lace on her young throat and a cameo beckoning love: time can only begin to touch the way she understands the world, a sash still tight around her waist and all, all she reaches for denied her without anything said as though she were invisibly an outcast diver swimming deep, drowning as she reaches for the pearl.
—Submitted on 09/26/2022
Katharyn Howd Machan is the author of Dark Side of the Spoon (The Moonstone Press, 2022) and many other collections. She edited Adrienne Rich: A Tribute Anthology (Split Oak Press, 2012) and other anthologies. A professor of writing in at Ithaca College, she served as Tompkins County’s first poet laureate. Machan lives with her husband, fellow poet Eric Machan Howd, and two cats, Footnote and Byron.
Editor’s Note: The series title Flush Left refers to the fact that, due to our limited WordPress skills, we are only considering poems that are flush left. Poems already in our Submittable queue that have simple non-flush-left formatting may be considered for publication.
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