What He Took

recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, she has received awards for her poetry from The Comstock Review, Federal Poet, Harbinger, Kansas Quarterly, New Millennium Writings, Poet, and prn. In collaboration with Arts in Progress and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, she has taught poetry to children in Boston area schools. She has also taught poetry and creative writing at Boston College. She and her husband live in Newton, Massachusetts, where they have raised their three children.

The Antigonish Review: “Father’s Glasses,” “On Thick White Paper,” “The Booth”;

Boston College Magazine: “Almost Egypt”;

Caprice: “Dust,” “Marooned”;

Chester H. Jones National Poetry Competition: “When My Father Dies”;

Cimarron Review: “What Lasts”;

The Comstock Review (formerly Poetpourri): “Fontanel,” “Perfumes Stare at Themselves,” “Polio Summer,” “This Is Only Practice”;

The Cortland Review (www.cortlandreview.com): “Let’s Do It This Year,” “Love Story,” “Scar”;

Hurricane Alice: “Annie Oakley Blows Kisses to Her Audience: The sun sets, staining snow . . .”;

Kansas Quarterly: “Ghost Flowers”;

New Millennium Writings: “Shouldn’t He Have Done Something?”;

Northwest Review: “Hives”; “We Get Married Again”;

The Onset Review: “This Is It”;

Oxford Magazine: “Mother In Her Black Lace Slip”;

paragraph: “Windows”;

Passages North: “In The Girls’ Room”;

Poet Lore: “Hiding Places,” “I Can’t Find His Obituary on Microfilm”;

Radcliffe Quarterly: “Annie Oakley Blows Kisses to Her Audience: I shoot the clay birds . . . ,” “World Series: Boston, 1986”;

Sandscript: “His Fingers Vague as Wings”;

Stuff: “How Men, How Women”;

Web Del Sol (www.webdelsol.com): “I Refuse to Wear My Red Cardigan,” “What He Took”;

West Branch: “Desire.”

“Polio Summer” appeared in the anthology Boomer Girls: Poems by Women from the Baby Boom Generation, Gemin, Pamela and Sergi, Paula, editors, (University of Iowa Press, 1999). “When My Father Dies” (as “Before My Father Dies”) and “This Is It” (as “Plums”) were reprinted in Poetry Tonight (www.poetrytonight.com).

Thanks to the editors who recognized some of the poems with awards: “Shouldn’t He Have Done Something?” (as “God And My Father on The Beach at San Pedro,” New Millennium Writings, 1998) and “Ghost Flowers” (as “Wintering Over,” Kansas Quarterly, 1994).

A woman had one foot in our yard,

her hands on my girl’s shoulders,

Where’s your mother?

quietly, like she was sharing a secret.

But my mind selects scenes for instant replay—

the missed ball, the ruined fruit.

Words I can’t take back.

People I could have loved, or loved better.

But they smile, earnest

as kindergarten teachers,

A lipstick, Beach Plum.

I hate the ordinary

boredom of my life, my cotton underpants,

the sharp question of each hipbone.

Mother says,

You’re imagining things again,

but I see dust in the air,

feel it heavy on my shoulders.

And he’ll pick me up

and carry me, his hip thrust out

for balance, my hand tight

around the back of his neck,

the cool pulse burning my tongue.