I am an English professor at a two-year college where I teach writing (creative and expository) and literature.  My poetry has appeared in a number of small magazines, and I have two poetry chapbooks, That’s the Way the Music Sounds, from Finishing Line Press (2009) and Talking to the Mirror from The Last Automat Press (2010).  In addition to loving poetry, I am also a fledgling mystery novelist in search of an agent.  I live with another English professor and poet, Dr. Van Hartmann, and would rather be rich than famous.  

Portrait I


So Marta, the woman who shared a hallway with me
at the school where I met my husband before his wife died;
she who down the hall one day was weeping
because she & her lover had broken
again, he to return to his wife,
and she to the quiet apartment she shared
with their thirty-year affair.
I wasn’t to tell; I was never to tell, a skill I was already versed in
having grown up in a house where mother slept all
afternoon, lonely shadows stretching across her still face,
dream journals open on the rumpled sheets.
 
There was a child once, a flight
to Puerto Rico before such things were legal,
a dead brother, parents for whom she cared as they lingered,
stalling her PhD, still unfinished, entangled again and again with him.
And now, near seventy, she teaches writing part-time, as always,
and reads intelligent books over vegetable dinners with wine
off the grid upstate in a farmhouse, hair long and silver,
her small, precise fingers flickering over a page of text.
At least this is how I imagine her, since we lost touch years ago:
quiet, reading, captured by Wyeth or Hopper, perhaps
looking out the window
at an empty field. 

 


 
Portrait II


My Aunt Carolyn, the last time I saw her, warned me not to stand
too close to the microwave because the ELFs caused cancer,
this as she heated a bag to clutch after the chemotherapy for her lungs
shrunk her to a stick. Later, she held my hand and told me she wanted me
with her at the pearly gates where she said all the aunties were waiting.
Two years now she’s been gone.
Oh, Auntie, I hope your pearly gates glisten with jewels and that you
have found forgiveness  for all your unnamed sins—and mine.
That your glorious soprano is singing in God’s choir, and,
if that’s where we all end up, I’ll be there with you,
at least painted in the background, like the girl with her hair in a braid
in Henry Lerolle’s The Organ Rehearsal, watching you at the balcony’s edge
in your funny hat, a little worse for the wear, singing to the sheer white light.