Tag: Gone

Gone by Barbara Eknoian

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Gone

The flowers are disappearing now
that it’s fall. Soon my property
will be covered with leaves, gone
will be the cheery yellow flowers.

My two grandsons have returned
to their home in Tennessee.
It was a short visit, but a happy one.
I make their beds until next time.

My oldest grandson has scheduled
his wedding for next autumn;
he has been here since he’s eleven.
The time will fly, and he’ll be gone.

I fell in June and broke my hip.
I’m alone most of the time. I’m learning
to walk again, but my phone stopped
ringing with invitations to go anywhere.

Hopefully, in time family and friends
will return, except for my son,
who I lost without warning.
He can’t return like the flowers.

*

Barbara Eknoian’s work has appeared in Pearl, Cadence Collective, Redshift, and Your Daily Poem. Recently, her New & Selected Poems, More Jerkustances, has been published by Editor Eric Morago. She lives in La Mirada, CA, with her daughter, grandson, two dogs, and two cats (one is mild and the other is full of mischief). There’s never a dull moment at her house.

Gone by Laura Goldin

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Gone

I lost my mother and then my metro card. A black pen,
single earring, more than the usual number of socks.

Where in the five-stage model is confusion –
dropping and breaking things, reading without

comprehension? Anger is there, but what of the rage
that shows up out of order, takes the corner chair and settles in,

preparing to eat everything: well-meaning people,
beloved people? I don’t sleep much anymore, but sleep

was never my forte. Three times in over sixty years
I disobeyed her: ate chocolate before dinner,

slept with my college boyfriend, stole what remained
of her lucidity when someone young enough

to be my child asked permission and I nodded, let them drip
the morphine she’d refused. A few times more I lied to her,

the last one when I said we’d take a short ride,
get the medicine, check out right afterward.

Go home again.

*

Laura Goldin is a publishing lawyer in New York. Five of her recent poems appear in the Spring 2023 issue of The Brooklyn Review; one is forthcoming in Driftwood Press 2024 Anthology, and one was a finalist for Best of the Net 2023. Others have been published or are forthcoming in a variety of journals including Apple Valley Review, Gargoyle Magazine, Mom Egg Review, and RHINO.