A River Sings | 01 24 21 | Dion O’Reilly

Posted on by

Dion O’Reilly
Two Poems

Ode to Dolly P.

Of course, your breasts—
your Motherland. Your Big Sky.

Your greatness pulling you
forward and forward.

We want to live
in your cleavage.

Gaze at your long nails
as they tick the fretboard.

We will always love you—

your native talent. Your hard
core story and bird-call trill.

Your odd combination
of Realness and Display.

I watch you on Jimmy Kimmel,
your gliss lips and chalk-white,

piled-high perfection.

I feel like Frank O’Hara.
Don’t collapse, Dolly Parton.

Don’t Collapse!

If you die, we won’t believe
you’re gone. We’ll keep

sighting you alive
like Jesus or Earhart.

Whatever you do, don’t stop
tottering along our American streets

in your dagger-sharp, blood-red,
open-toed pumps.

Girl, you’re all we’ve got left.

Prince Charles, Your Mother Won’t Die

I imagine that verge feeling
of waking a second before

the alarm and the alarm
never sounds

so you can’t get up.

Is it hard, even for a prince,
to count his blessings?

Aren’t you like a child who can’t sleep
on a kidnapper’s
1000-count sheets?

What a lovely hell—days and days
of perfect drought,

her long life pulling
eternity’s golden bow,

arrow notched and waiting
knuckle pointing

at an unending century
of Corgis and commonwealth.

We watch you wait, wanting
the old world to exfoliate,

reveal the pink skin
of the young. But you’re not

young anymore, bitter prince
who never mounts a throne.

Will we ever know
the green garden of your hopes?

Every morning the sky
must seem like a diamond
of impressive size

on the thin finger
of your perpetually
unpopular wife.

—Submitted on 01/17/2021 to the erstwhile Poems in the Afterglow series

Dion O’Reilly is the author of Ghost Dogs (Terrapin Books, 2020). Her work has appeared in New Ohio Review, The Massachusetts Review, Sugar House Review, Rattle, Tupelo Quarterly, and other journals and anthologies. O’Reilly has spent much of her life on a farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains, working at various times as a theater manager, graphic designer, and public school teacher, among other occupations.

SUBMIT to A River Sings via our SUBMITTABLE site. 

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value our online series, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Editor’s Note: The series title A River Sings is borrowed from “On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem read by Maya Angelou at the first inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993. 

submit

A River Sings | 01 23 21 | Diane Ray

Posted on by

Diane Ray
A flaw in the inauguration, otherwise perfect as its palindromic


date, the rarely formatted 1/20/2021, somehow symbolic of the rarity of this moment in time to save a nation and a planet before the clock runs out. I’m certain my bursting tears found company among the wet-eyed many when our new President Biden began to speak, we who nightmared through Trump’s four long years, culminating in the long slog through election returns and fake news challenges, on through a sitting president giving a violent coup its marching orders. Seared into memory from two weeks past, still haunted by the Confederate flag and Nazi slogans flounced through Congress, a policeman pummeled in the vise of a window, others dragged and beaten by a mob, one killed. The living cartoon of a horned, bare-chested Viking lolling about in the Speaker’s seat accompanied by fellow travelers striking Washington-crossing-the-Delaware selfie poses, whose idiocy unwittingly provided cover for the hard corps militia-trained, narrowly thwarted from carrying out far worse than the five lives sacrifice….

Demagogue-in-chief now flown, today I joined the many in hypnotic trance, reveling in wonder at history’s turned page and at long last able to freely breathe, listening to just-minted President Biden’s eloquent and timely words, proffered with his super power for compassionate reaching out to friend and former foe alike, who let fly the better angel offspring of Lincoln and St. Augustine as we witnessed American Democracy reclaimed, his speech hitting all the high notes of needed pledge to cut through the multiple thorny thickets confronting We, the People, including the spiraling overgrowth of covid virus as we brace ourselves to hack through the worst weeks yet.

Regal young poetic queen, Amanda Gorman, National Youth Poet Laureate, her hands festooning words like dancing butterflies, read rhythmically and flawlessly her deeply informed poetic tribute, and if you did not know it, you would have no idea of her valiant battle for fluent speech, who two years before could not utter the letter “r”—like the new President, a living symbol of humankind’s capacity to heal and overcome in behalf of speaking your truth.

Were you, like me, entranced by all this grace and promise, which at least for a while blinded you to the covid gaffes? When the new administration could have modeled how to easily reach for and grab the gold ring of covid safety free and clear, could have passed out cautions like socks in the mouth of normal spontaneity? Instead, we witnessed close encounters—our brand new President finishing his maskless speech, still bare faced once seated, who hugged his famously impeccable old friend, former President Obama who then held his own hug fest with a gaggle of former cronies while we tuned in from our covid spaceships, each one of us voyaging in the dark as to just what more infectious means regarding the enterprising new covid strains lurking among us while health care crisis in L.A. recently rose to the watermark for rationing of who shall have a crack at care, who shall wait eight hours in ambulance or not even score the ticket of ambulance-worthy. Why any pandemic ball drop with covid cast in the starring role of President Biden’s top priority as wily mutants stalk us from sea to shining sea?

—Submitted on 01/21/2021

Diane Ray’s work appears in Cirque, The Jewish Literary Journal, In Layman’s Terms, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Sisyphus, and other journals, as well as in  anthologies including Sheltering in Place (Staring Problems Press, 2020). Ray, a native New Yorker, lives near Green Lake in Seattle and works as a psychologist.

SUBMIT to A River Sings via our SUBMITTABLE site. 

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value our online series, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Editor’s Note: The series title A River Sings is borrowed from “On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem read by Maya Angelou at the first inauguration of Bill Clinton on January 20, 1993. 

submit

A River Sings | 01 22 21 | Rachel Ida Buff

Posted on by

Rachel Ida Buff
Pandemic Winter

The unhoused man who comes to our door,
Asking for money for food, for bus fare, or rent, when he has a place
Annoys my husband. “If you give him things,
He’ll just come back,” he says.

It’s cold outside today, the virus is surging, I have no cash.
Like some unhinged sovereign in a well-warmed castle, I wave the man away.
An Amazon van stops, motor idling. The driver jumps out,
Clutching some gift for us. The two men pass on our stoop.

In my study, the cat wakes and purrs onto my lap.
When a neighbor first brought her to our door,
We let her in, fed her. After that, she went out but
Always circled back, became part of the household.

Gift exchanges and cat-shaped dents on pillows: rings of love,
Of kin. Outside them are well-buttressed walls, locks on the doors.
Though we call each other by name, I never invite the unhoused man inside.
We talk, I thrust him cash or outerwear, I turn away.

Last year the cops shot a different unhoused man, asleep
In a nearby bank lobby. He had a weapon,
They said. I imagined Franklin, the man I know,
Curled around a baseball bat, dreaming his own protected enclave.

—Submitted on 01/11/2021 to the erstwhile Poems in the Afterglow series

Rachel Ida Buff is the author of A is for Asylum Seeker: Words for People on the Move / A de Asilo: Palabras para Personas en Movimiento (Fordham, 2020), with Spanish translation by Alejandra Oliva. Her poetry and prose have appeared in The Nation, Aeon, The Southern Review, The Minnesota Review, Jewish Currents, and other journals. Buff is a history professor at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where she directs the Cultures and Communities program.

SUBMIT to A River Sings via our SUBMITTABLE site. 

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value our online series, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Editor’s Note: The series title A River Sings is borrowed from “On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem read by Maya Angelou at the first inauguration of Bill Clinton on January 20, 1993. 

submit

A River Sings | 01 21 21 | Jade Yeung

Posted on by

Jade Yeung
I Consider Blocking My Mom Until the Presidential Inauguration

WeChat Message / December 19, 2020 / Brooklyn, NY

[#]
Daughter daughter I worry about you.1

[#]
You need to stock up the house.2 Water. You need to buy water. You need to buy more food.3 These coming days. Now until January. I’m worried there won’t be water or electricity or internet. [in english] No wifi. No water, no internet. You need to stock up. They won’t let us leave the house. Don’t worry about me—I’m all stocked up. It’s you I’m worried about.4

[#]
Daughter I’m being serious. You need to stock up on food, any food.5 You haven’t seen what I’ve seen. A long time ago we had nothing. It caused a lot of problems. Much trouble.6 As long as you have food that’s all that matters. As long as a human being has food, they can thrive. Do you know what I’m saying?7 You’re still so young. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it.

[#]
There’ll be shortages.8 You won’t be able to leave the house or people will come to your house. America will have a lot of problems now until late January. Do you know what I’m saying, daughter?9

WeChat Message / December 19, 2020 / Jersey City, NJ

[#]
Okay, mah. I’m okay.10

WeChat Message / January 13, 2021 / Brooklyn, NY

[#]
Daughter daughter, remember to buy more water and food and candles.11 Candles, the things you light. I’m scared we won’t have electricity. You need to get cash. Cash at home so you can buy food. There won’t be internet. The machines won’t work. Credit cards won’t work. So keep cash at home. Buy water. By the gallons.12

[#]
These next few days they won’t let us go outside.13Daughter don’t leave the house. I’ve stocked a lot here. I was worried you wouldn’t know what to buy. [laughs] You’re so far. You wouldn’t be able to walk over here if you needed to. Anyway. There will be nothing to eat.14 If there’s no electricity the trains won’t even run.15 You

[now in english] take care—goodnigh’

  1. No one will say the estimated death toll for the Great Famine. Maybe 30. Maybe 55. Million. This body remembers even when archives lie.
  2. Long Live the Great Leap Forward ! Everybody, Make Steel !
  3. An estimated 100 million peasants were pulled out of agricultural work and placed into steel production.
  4. Things I’ve purged: siblings, masturbation, men.
  5. They said, “Capable women can make a meal without food.” Even rhetoric demands to have its feet rubbed.
  6. “The difficult period,” the state’s euphemism for the famine.
  7. Mom uses a word I don’t understand but sounds like 商城, which I badly translate on g**gle to “quotient city.” As in my body needs food so that I can figure out the number of cities contained in me.
  8. Example monthly ration: 19 lbs of rice, 3.5 oz of cooking oil, and 3.5 oz of meat (maybe).
  9. Reminders of scarcity: ziplock bags, glass jars with the labels soaked off.
  10. During the famine, a farmer claimed that he grew cabbages weighing over 500 lbs each. We make fantasies for each other. We think the past isn’t watching.
  11. The last time we didn’t have electricity was in the blackout of 2003. I remember the candles, the family milling around. The crappy Good Charlotte album on repeat. Brother Cop didn’t touch me that day like he did every other day. And he didn’t ask me to touch him.
  12. Why does a “better life” always mean running water?
  13. When I realized that playing with toys and playing with our bodies was not the same game, it was too late. I didn’t want to play anymore. I wanted to go home. But I was already home.
  14. Things I’ve purged: fig newtons, cheeseburgers, doritos.
  15. Some days I skipped school and slept in Riverside Park. When I sobered up I’d wander the seven miles down to Union Square. I had just enough absences to graduate.

—Submitted on

Jade Yeung is pursuing an MFA at Rutgers-Newark, where she is a Trustees Fellow. Raised in Brooklyn, New York, Yeung is the child of Toishanese immigrants.

SUBMIT to A River Sings via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value A River Sings, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Editor’s Note: The series title A River Sings is borrowed from “On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem read by Maya Angelou at the first inauguration of Bill Clinton on January 20, 1993. 

submit

A River Sings | 01 20 21 | Sandra Shagat

Posted on by

Sandra Shagat
Empty Saddle Trail

I take you on a path I’ve found to
show you the peacocks that strut wild
on Strawberry Lane, introduce you to horses,
so many horses—young horses, old
horses with sunken spines,
small horses, tall horses, big
horses with bellies as thick as steer,
white horses, Palominos, one you christen
Black Beauty, of course, Chestnuts,
a brown and white Paint.
I lay it all out for you like God—
like a picnic—acres of backyards that end at stables,
fill your nose with green hay and horse shit
and horse sweat. I lead you through
the rolling hills where there are no houses
to be seen. In the dark gullies,
the temperature drops 10 degrees—you agree
you can feel it. The only plane overhead
is a low-flying one from Louis Zamperini Field.
The strangers we meet along the way are pleasant
as people are who live in white homes and
venture outside on a sunny day between the holidays
to pull the trash bins back in.
Outside a house under renovation,
a man leans alone against a pick-up truck.
I’m sure it’s his family we saw earlier—
we passed them on the trail—
maskless kids who ran down the hill counting horses
their own hair tossing like manes.
So, we’re all doing the same thing:
passing through a life we can’t afford.
You work it out aloud as we walk:
how much it would cost to pay a mortgage plus
taxes here, how much to keep a horse.
Near the end, we find a row of citrus
along a split-rail fence and
let our daughter scamper like a baby
ape for fallen fruit. She rises from the dry
streambed with six lemons and three Mandarins.
You decide you’d rather have a boat.

—Submitted on 01/19/2021 to the erstwhile Poems in the Afterglow series

Sandra Shagat holds a BA in English from Cornell University, and an MA in modern thought and literature from Stanford. Raised in a small town on the Jersey Shore, Shagat lives with her family in the suburban South Bay of Los Angeles, where she works in corporate communications.

SUBMIT to A River Sings via our SUBMITTABLE site. 

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value our online series, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Editor’s Note: The series title A River Sings is borrowed from “On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem read by Maya Angelou at the first inauguration of Bill Clinton on January 20, 1993. 

submit

Transition: Poems in the Afterglow | 01 20 21 | Tara Menon

Posted on by

Tara Menon
Eve of the Presidential Inauguration

Dusk is setting
on the eve of the presidential inauguration.
There hasn’t been such a transition
from evil to good
in this century.
The earth heaves,
expelling some of the clogged evil
trapped under the ozone.
The man who was born
to defeat Trump will ascend.
Millions hold their breaths,
praying he will be safe.

—Submitted on 01/19/2021

Tara Menon‘s poems have appeared in Emrys Online Journal, Rigorous, Infection House, The Inquisitive Eater, The Tiger Moth Review, and other journals, as well as in the anthology Art in the Time of Covid-19 (San Fedele Press, 2020). She has also published fiction, book reviews, and essays in numerous journals including Many Mountains Moving, The Kenyon Review, Parabola, and India New England. Menon, an Indian-American, lives in Lexington, Mass. 

This is the last poem in the Traditions: Poems in the Afterglow series. SUBMIT to our new online series, A River Sings, via our SUBMITTABLE site. 

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value our online series, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.




submit

Transition: Poems in the Afterglow | 01 19 21 | Marjorie Moorhead

Posted on by

Marjorie Moorhead
Another Chickadee Poem

All pandemic long, I’ve been watching
chickadees.

Observing their swooping flight
to the feeder from scraggly branches.

Always taking turns;
no collisions, no fights.

Swoop in, take a seed,
swoop out.

I could watch them all day,
like flame of a campfire

or a baby in a crib, looking up
with sparkling eyes, existing

in some joyful world where knowledge
of hateful things hasn’t entered.

That shining pool
of innocence.

The irises like doors
to infinity

inviting you
back in.

—Submitted on 01/11/2021

Marjorie Moorhead is the author of the chapbooks Survival: Trees, Tides, Song (Finishing Line Press 2019), and Survival Part 2: Trees, Birds, Ocean, Bees (Duck Lake Books 2020). Her poems have appeared in Sheila-Na-Gig, Porter House Review, Verse-Virtual, Rising Phoenix Review, Amethyst Review, Tiny Seed, Consilience, and other journals, as well as in nine anthologies, including Covid Spring (Hobblebush Books, 2020). A new collection is forthcoming from Indolent Books in 2021. Moorhead lives on the NH/VT border.

SUBMIT to Transition: Poems in the Afterglow via our SUBMITTABLE site. 

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value Poems in the Afterglow, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.




submit

Transition: Poems in the Afterglow | 01 18 21 | Ellen S. Jaffe

Posted on by

Ellen S. Jaffe
They Came to the Capitol

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
—W.B. Yeats

We saw the rough beast slouch, slither, and stomp
its way to the Capitol,
heeding its misanthropic master,
past-master of lies, deceit, arrogance,
and mocking cruelty. They bought
into marching orders that never should have been ordered,

broke windows and laws,
bones and the sense of decency and patriotism,
even as they paraded sham-patriotic signs
and slogans. Did you see the Confederate flags
and the Auschwitz sweatshirt,
among the red-white-and-blue placards
waved by these ghost-white, sheet-white rebels,
storming unmasked in the middle of a pandemic?

Their violence was also naked, unmasked,
urged on by their hero, encouraged
by other legislators (even those who now cry foul).
The leader who incited them to “glory”
now reads teleprompter words in a flat, lifeless voice,
urging calm, denouncing the “heinous” act, promising peaceful transition—
after weeks of swearing how badly he’d been robbed.
But he ends his talk with animation:
our incredible journey is only beginning.

No, his journey is ending—finished, past, kaput,
over and done with.
And so, I hope, is his followers’—
may they see their folly before too late.
And may what slouches birthward in this city, this nation,
be human, not monster,
liberty and justice for all
a reality for all of us, each one of us
in our own skin and heart,
not another lie masquerading as the truth.

—Submitted on 01/09/2021

Ellen S. Jaffe is the author of Water Children (Mini Mocho Press, 2002), Skinny-Dipping With the Muse (Guernica Editions, 2014), and The Day I Saw Willie May (Pinking Shears Publications, 2019), as well as a young-adult novel, Feast of Lights (Sumach Press, 2006), and a book on writing, Writing Your Way (Sumach Press, 2001). Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Canadian Poetry for the 21st Century (Lummox Press, 2018). Jaffe grew up in New York City, and lives in Toronto. 

SUBMIT to Transition: Poems in the Afterglow via our SUBMITTABLE site. 

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value Poems in the Afterglow, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.




submit

Transition: Poems in the Afterglow | 01 17 21 | Ronda Piszk Broatch

Posted on by

Ronda Piszk Broatch
Two Poems

Where There is No Hope, One Must Invent Hope

When my bleary eyes pull heart blade
from hearth side, I think of Job – let my cry
have no resting place. I believe the rain

has read this news. As has the onion,
the president’s voice, the lash of black-
berry vine, bitterest lemon, the gravesite

carnation still whole weeks after. Suffering
has a keen scent, an over-extended autonomic
nervous breakdown. I imagine

Elie Wiesel at the Wailing Wall.
I think the rain cares nothing for the news.
The news reaches its inky fingers into my heart

searching for something sharp. Wearing safety glasses
when cutting an onion leads to dreams
of dissection, a fear of infinity. I think if this

country gets any kinder or gentler,
it’s literally going to cease to exist. The fathomless
black hole of chaos weeps at the news

it may soon be usurped. Blackberry vines
protect even the bitterest of blackened hearts.
Suffering locks the knife drawer.

Self, I see you reading between the lines—
the ouroboros cannot wail with its tail in its mouth.
Lacking a head, it’s just a tail. Camus tells us,

Là où il n’y a pas d’espoir,
il faut inventer l’espoir. In a black hole,
every blade returns to its sharpest beginnings,

holds hands with suffering. I wander
the news of a morning, all my sorrows curled
in a puddle at my feet.

When You Don Your Macro-Self-Glorification Fedora, I Grind My Clay Pigeons, Shredded My Thistle-Pained Pages

I’m sorry for this sad-ass country, sawed-off 3 am Twitter tweeter eclipsing all the good news yet to be had. I regret I didn’t clip my toenails before the hike, scrambling boulders to reach Heart Lake in the rain, that I lied when my old boyfriend asked me if I voted for Reagan. My favorite pundit never had a nebula, but I’m sure he blew a pinwheel, pinned a yata to the ISS before it traversed the heavens in hopes of finding some sort of intelligence seemingly void on our own planet. When I disposed of the narcissus bulbs, the narcissist blowing up Twitter because he didn’t win re-election, didn’t lead in the polls, but instead led an insurrection, I crashed the party where the muscles of my back revolted and squeezed the last nerve I have left. The June moon and Smokey the Bear couldn’t advise me how to punctuate this shit show—the one where a guy dressed as a moose, and hundreds of others dressed as themselves stormed the halls of Congress, putting their dirty boots on Nancy Pelosi’s desk, and stole a plinth while smiling at someone’s iPhone camera. My menorah is one candle short of Hanukkah, and my tragic flaw is your velvet manta ray, your mantra to the universe where every beanie baby is released from the dark cavity of your mother’s dresser drawers. I dreamt the whole ball of wax, cats multiplying before my eyes, the chalk-lined and the side-lined, how you opened for Ted Nugent, and took up the bow and arrow. In my next life I will learn to fly again, and this time I’ll get it right. My chi is stuck between my clavichord and my clavicle, and my sternocleidomastoid is equal to X most of the time. I will never understand the quantum levels of Planck lengths you will go to keep your position as narcissist in chief but am happy to visualize you in orange brighter than your painted on tan. I’m not sorry to imagine a world without you, Mr. Never-was-my-Prez. I think the ISS has a trick hatch, and the hinges are working just fine.

—Submitted on 

Ronda Piszk Broatch is the author of Lake of Fallen Constellations (MoonPath Press, 2015), Shedding Our Skins (Finishing Line Press, 2008), and Some Other Eden (Finishing Line Press, 2005). Her poems have appeared in Blackbird, Diagram, Sycamore Review, Missouri Review, Palette Poetry, and other journals. She lives in Washington State. 

SUBMIT to Transition: Poems in the Afterglow via our SUBMITTABLE site. 

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value Poems in the Afterglow, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.




submit

Transition: Poems in the Afterglow | 01 16 21 | Kathy Nativo

Posted on by

Kathy Nativo
Two Poems

Live in the Moment

Encourage yourself, Humanity, to live as young as you are.
You are in primary school and most survive it.
There is no need to invent holidays.
Every day is one.
Live in the moment.
Your fate is not set.
Draw pictures.
Use your words.
Learn to express.
Keep yourself open like a pantry door.
The truth of the matter, Humanity, is that you haven’t yet discovered
even the first line of your story.
Your first steps are tottering ones.
You are a species among many.
Life abounds around you.
You are nurtured by nature.
You can fall on its hardest surface and it will cushion you.
You stand a chance, standing ankle deep in the stream of time.
All of your windows are raised for you to look out of and still feel secure.
Oh Humanity, life is a game.
You don’t have to play it well.
Just enjoy the play, as all children do.

Eco Iko Iko

The climate of the world has changed.
All the little fires have become a conflagration.
The world is Rome and it’s burning.
The arctic has seen its day.
The iceberg that the Titanic struck no longer exists.
It melted leaving hope with the survivors
for bias, bigotry and prejudice to melt too.
In this small world of inhabitants to many—too many,
Nero and Molly Brown have become compatriots.

Gardeners, grow all the flowers, grass and vegetables you want.
Then cast what it took to grow them into the stream that runs through your town.
Home dwellers, burn Roman Candles on your lawn just for fun.
Entertain your neighbors but don’t save them.
Florists, put your thoughts in flower boxes.
Hang them on brackets outside your window.
Their colors and type will speak for you, even yell.
One can do worse than yelling outside your window.
Crow like a well feathered and well fed crow.

The boundaries of Earth are nature made.
We are causing them to change by setting them ablaze.
We soil the soil with our waste.
We taint the tides of the oceans with our detritus.
We enclose our spaciousness with fences and walls.
In being bound our grief will know no bounds.
We advance to shoot off the Earth on those Roman rockets
to bring the debris of our ethos into the cosmos.

In the natural world we must relearn to take our place.
In eco-green we should place our trust
by not just planting the seeds of reparation
but planting them with appreciation, purpose and thankfulness.

—Submitted on 01/08/2021

Kathy Nativo‘s poems have appeared in Beat of the Street and Poetry On The Streets. She is a musician and retired music instructor in in Wethersfield, Conn. 

SUBMIT to Transition: Poems in the Afterglow via our SUBMITTABLE site. 

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value Poems in the Afterglow, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.




submit