The following two poems were published in the Winter/Spring 2006 edition of the Birmingham Poetry Review:
After the Amputation
At ninety-five in the nursing home,
Aunt Opal says I don’t know where my leg is,
and my mother replies someone’s taking good care of it.
Her dead husband, forgotten. Her small house,
not even a memory. But the body knows
when something is lost: how the spirit, severed at birth,
has trouble staying in skin & bone.
Floating On The Wide, Blue Sea
I remember Uncle Bob’s chair in the Long Beach apartment
where he’d settled with Aunt Opal after the war—
the trundle bed opening from the wall,
the blue vinyl box of toys, the prune juice each morning—
how I’d sit in his lap nights listening to the radio,
feel the weathered blue cotton of the denim shirt
he always wore, remnant of his Navy days,
the way his eyes would drift far away into the stories
Opal whispered in the kitchen, about why he was so silent—
buddies floating in the blue sea, the way war sinks you even deeper still.
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