Tag: sister

Two Poems by Laura Foley

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Coming Out to My Sister

My sister—
the aloof one—
wasn’t, that day.
She took my arm,
led me through Georgetown,
sunlight on brick sidewalks,
into a small boutique
where we found clothes
soft as permission.

I chose a black silk cape,
delicate women stitched
across the back—
a garment that felt
like stepping into myself.

For a little while
she smiled at me,
held clothes to my shoulders,
wanting to see
who I might become.

Many years now
she hasn’t called,
doesn’t answer emails—
has slipped again
into distance, into silence.

But the cape still hangs
in my closet,
light as breath,
reminding me
of the one day
we were gentle
with each other.

*

Tea and Sympathy

She drives all the way to my house,
up a steep hill in the woods of Vermont.

“I understand—this is someone’s life,”
she offers, as she stamps and signs,
as I sign and sign, blue pen looping my name.

We sit at the kitchen table.
She pats our dog,
explaining how, in her free time,
she takes in elderly Labradors
at the end of their lives.

“Give them a year or two of happiness.
One just passed, last week.
I still wake at night to take him out.”

We share spiced cookies,
Earl Grey tea,
as she tells me about her health,
a difficult teenage son,
how she loves to work on her own.

Meanwhile, I’m signing page after page—
tax documents, a deed—
as I sell my sister’s townhouse in Texas,
the one she flooded
as she was dying in her tub.

Sheila places her cup in the sink,
scans the documents into her phone,
beams them off across the country.

As she leaves, I feel lighter,
freer of a sister
I hadn’t known well—hadn’t seen in forty years;

thankful for the sympathy—
a notary
whose stamp feels like kindness.

*

Laura Foley is the author of, most recently, Sledding the Valley of the Shadow, and Ice Cream for Lunch. Sister in a Different Movie (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions) is due out later this spring. She has won a Narrative Magazine Poetry Prize, Common Good Books Poetry Prize, Poetry Box Editor’s Choice Chapbook Award, Bisexual Book Award, and others. Her work has been widely published in such journals as Alaska Quarterly, Valparaiso Poetry Review, ONE ART, American Life in Poetry, and anthologies such as How to Love the World and Poetry of Presence. She holds graduate degrees in Literature from Columbia University, and lives with her wife on the steep banks of the Connecticut River in New Hampshire.

I had a sister once. by Robbi Nester

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I had a sister once.

But she was born dead. Her eyes stayed shut.
Ten tiny moons set on her fingernails.
I didn’t ask my mother how it happened, just
imagined a wax-pale doll who never answered
to her name. All my life, I took the full weight
of my father’s rage. It blew up like a sudden storm.
For years this sister spoke to me, saying Everything
you have is mine, perched on the edge of my bed,
no longer larval, a grown ghost child. Her fingernails
were long and sharp. She would pinch my arm
until it bled.

*

Robbi Nester is a retired college educator who has never stopped teaching in one way or another. She is the author of 5 collections of poetry, the most recent being About to Disappear, an ekphrastic collection that will be published by Shanti Arts. She has also edited 3 anthologies and curates and hosts two monthly poetry readings on Zoom, Verse-Virtual Monthly Reading and Words With You, part of The Poetry Salon Online. Learn more about her work at http://www.robbinester.net.

Birding with My Sister by Pamela Wax

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Birding with My Sister

She tracks the migration of hummingbirds,
calls to say they were in Philly two days ago,
could arrive today at her lake house in upstate
New York. Her feeders shine red with nectar,

readied. Last summer she fell for a blue
heron. She’d moor in the middle
of the lake, play a game of dare with him,
refused to part first. She swore he waited

on the banks for her to kayak past
for their rendezvous, sent me daily
photos of his one-legged posturing.
We joked about this boyfriend, the time

she spent in pursuit. I even googled him,
wondered if Heron might break her heart.
But he’s a symbol of calm, his visitations
a call for deep breath, pause. Just one

is never a siege. Today I bird with her,
anticipate the dare of charm, tune, shimmer
of flock, the pungent bouquet of truth in wings
chattering with brio and hum. Had I not

been a fish in my other life, I’d adopt her
reverence for flight, for yogic postures
lakefront, for plotting patterns of exodus
and stations of oasis on the migrant

journey. But I am propelled to undulate,
flapping and feeding in the great,
briny school of the deep, not rooted
to land, nor destined for flight.

*

Pamela Wax is the author of Walking the Labyrinth (Main Street Rag, 2022) and Starter Mothers (Finishing Line Press, 2023). Her poems have received a Best of the Net nomination and awards from Crosswinds, Paterson Literary Review, Poets’ Billow, Oberon, and the Robinson Jeffers Tor House. She has been published in dozens of literary journals including Barrow Street, Tupelo Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, Chautauqua, The MacGuffin, Nimrod, Solstice, Mudfish, Connecticut River Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Slippery Elm. An ordained rabbi, Pam offers spirituality and poetry workshops online and around the country. She lives in the Northern Berkshires of Massachusetts.

At the MoMA, With My Sister and Without My Glasses by A. A. Gunther

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At the MoMA, With My Sister and Without My Glasses

I say
I love the way—
You grab my wrist:

Don’t put it into
words, don’t get it
twisted,

It just needs to exist.

So here I am, unmoored at the
museum,
Squinting at shapes arising in my vision
Like clifftops in the mist,
My eyes unlensed, imbibing the horizons
Of oddly-lighted rooms.
Of wire looms festooned with metal scraps,
Of dangled circuits lapsing into lassos,
Of crosshatched gray and black,
Of persons in long jackets
who murmur words like “angular” at the Picassos,

Trying to stop my words
From tangling round the things before I see them—
Their imprecision, their syllabic gallop,
The sleaze of them, like greasy bacon wrapped around a scallop,
Negating what they promise to enhance
With appetizer’s, advertiser’s, ease:
The cunning of them, running interference
Between the naked eye and the appearance,
Subtracting the refraction of a glance.

*

A. A. Gunther is a legal writer living in Long Island, New York. She has a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing and Literature from the Harvard University Extension School, and her short story “Baby Teeth” appeared in the Easter 2022 issue of Dappled Things. No art museum will be the same to her until her sister comes back from Germany.

Three Poems by Faith Shearin

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Telephone Booths

I shut the door and wept over failed math tests
and wayward boyfriends, told my mother
about bad cafeteria food, nosebleeds, my part
in the school play. At summer camp I found them

between cabins in a forest of old growth pines
and settled myself on a shelf-like seat, held the stiff
silver cord like something umbilical. Phone booths were
liminal spaces, both public and private —

a contradiction I loved. They were the size
of closets, confessionals, coffins. Though
mostly extinct I passed one
this summer in an open field — each pane of glass
reflecting swaying wildflowers — and remembered

the distant disembodied voice of my grandfather
and the way Clark Kent became Superman.

*

My Sister, Age Two

My sister, age two, stands with her back to the camera
dressed in a diaper and our mother’s high heeled shoes.
The image is grainy, low quality — some sort of instant

Polaroid with oversized white borders — but in the dim light
I can make out woven wallpaper, shag carpet and,
inside a wooden console, the fat TV we owned

in 1978 — antennae wrapped in aluminum foil
to improve the stormy reception. She is thin
with a thatch of unruly hair and one hand rests

on her hip, as if she’s already stepping into the wobbly
shoes of adulthood, preparing for the epic battles
with our mother and the year she will spend

at our father’s bedside. This is different from the prints
in which she rests like a doll in the arms of every vanishing
grandparent, different from the portraits in which she stands

beside our brother, a full head
shorter than he is though she is a year and a half older.
It is different even from the snapshots in which she wears

a t-shirt that labels all the bones of her skeleton
or has built herself a winged mosquito
costume for Halloween. She is nearly

naked except for the shoes, and alone,
and already herself in the shadowy frame: unaware
of the camera’s gaze, or too elated to care that she

has been caught stealing beauty from our mother’s closet.

*

My Father’s Cancer was like the Loch Ness Monster

The Loch Ness monster is a shape shifter:
a serpentine creature, sometimes pink,

sometimes black, her long neck and humps rising
from a misty lake in the Scottish Highlands; she slithers

in vague photos and sonar readings and might be
a swimming elephant from a visiting circus, a wind slick,

or some oversized eel. She may or may not have drowned
men and it is difficult to say

whether she is furry or scaly. Likewise my father’s
skin cancer began in his ear but metastasized —

masquerading as a cyst above his eye — and, in this way,
went undetected by scans until the full malignancy

uncoiled beneath the surface of his face; his cancer
travelled on nerves, eroding bones,

which was like drifting on hidden currents,
and still a late and painful biopsy

proved inconclusive. In Glen Mor, on the shores of River Ness,
which flows into Moray Firth

where deep waters rise and fall
there were unexplained sightings — a wriggling and churning, a large

stubby-legged animal resembling a salamander —
which was like my father seeing double

as his eyelid began to droop. The Loch Ness monster
continues to elude investigators who imagine her as a wooden head

attached to a submarine, or the leg of a hippo stuck
to an umbrella, or a moose

or camel, or as some ancient marine reptile — a dinosaur maybe —
that escaped the cretaceous period though this wasn’t

supposed to be possible.

*

Faith Shearin’s seven books of poetry include: The Owl Question (May Swenson Award), Telling the Bees (SFA University Press), Orpheus, Turning (Dogfish Poetry Prize), Darwin’s Daughter (SFA University Press), and Lost Language (Press 53). Her poems have been read aloud on The Writer’s Almanac and included in American Life in Poetry. She has received awards from Yaddo, The National Endowment for the Arts, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her essays and short stories have won awards from New Ohio Review, The Missouri Review, The Florida Review, and Literal Latte, among others. Two YA novels — Lost River, 1918 and My Sister Lives in the Sea — won The Global Fiction Prize, judged by Anthony McGowan, and have been published by Leapfrog Press.

To My Sister on the Anniversary of Her Death from Covid by Margaret Dornaus

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To My Sister on the Anniversary
of Her Death from Covid

It’s been two years, and there are
those who still ask me to believe
you’re in a better place. Or
that we all are now that all is
said and done. Now that life is
back to normal, or at least
back to a semblance of the life
we once knew. Remember
how you liked to say you were

our mother? How you’d take us all
on weekend outings to bowling
alleys and drive-ins. The larger than
life images of good and evil projected
on a big screen. How we’d watch
Kong battling Godzilla, wide-eyed,
sure of nothing more than our own story.
The way summer nights embraced us,
the way starshine followed us home.

*

Margaret Dornaus holds an MFA in the translation of poetry from the University of Arkansas. A semifinalist in Naugatuck River Review’s 13th annual Narrative Poetry Contest, she had the privilege of editing and publishing a pandemic-themed anthology—behind the mask: haiku in the time of Covid-19—through her small literary press Singing Moon in 2020. Her first book of poetry, Prayer for the Dead: Collected Haibun & Tanka Prose, won a 2017 Merit Book Award from the Haiku Society of America. Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in I-70 Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Minyan Magazine, MockingHeart Review, ONE ART, Silver Birch Press, and The Ekphrastic Review.

Two Poems by Tamara Madison

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One Thanksgiving

My daughter, I know,
will not be coming
all the way from school
in New York. Then my son
says he’ll spend the day
with his girlfriend’s folks;
he can’t make
the long drive down
for our favorite holiday.

Ah, I say to myself.
They hurt you
when they enter this world;
they hurt you again
as they leave your side.

I take my solitary self in hand,
invite some lonely friends and plan.
So strange, without my daughter’s
kitchen skills, my boy’s
toasts and cheer and help.
I make the meal myself this time;
I even make the pies.

The friends arrive,
the wine is opened;
we gather around
the golden bird,
beets glistening on a bed
of garlic-studded greens,
the cranberry sauce
I always make
with marmalade
and lemon zest.

The moment I set
the last dish down,
the front door opens
and my lad walks in,
with his love on his arm.
My astonished face,
my friends will tell me later:
the embodiment of Thanksgiving.

*

Staying With My Sister

My sister’s husband says they can’t
go out to dinner anymore — there’s nothing
to talk about. He asks me to stay with her
while he goes to a conference.
I am glad for the change of scene
and to be with my big sister who has shown me
so much love all my life. I take her
to a restaurant — there’s plenty to talk about:
the menu, other diners, our parents.

My sister used to love to cook.
Now I’m the one making meals.
She wants to help, asks if she should
peel the garlic. Sure, I tell her, not thinking
as her husband might, of the perils
of the paring knife. I busy myself
with the rest of the meal. When I turn back,
I see she has peeled both whole knobs:
the cloves cluster like a trove of pearls.

*
Tamara Madison is the author of the chapbook “The Belly Remembers”, and two full-length volumes of poetry, “Wild Domestic” and “Moraine”, all published by Pearl Editions. Her work has appeared in Chiron Review, the Worcester Review, A Year of Being Here, Nerve Cowboy, the Writer’s Almanac and many other publications. A swimmer, dog lover and native of the southern California desert, she has recently retired from teaching English and French in a Los Angeles high school. Read more about her at tamaramadisonpoetry.com.

My Mother’s Coat on a Stranger (Phone Call with My Sister) by James Harms

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My Mother’s Coat on a Stranger (Phone Call with My Sister)

No way, really?
Was it the blue one? The puffy one
she wore those last few years
that matched her eyes
sort of too much, as if
everything about her, her entire
presence was staring at you?
You think the woman bought it
at Goodwill? Do you remember
calling me from the drive-thru drop-off
sobbing about the teenage girl
who’d taken the bags of clothes
from the trunk, how you stood there
crying as she quietly lifted each
one and walked them through
the automatic sliding glass doors?
You told me, she had a nose ring
and lilac hair, remember?
Was she taller or shorter
than Mom, the lady wearing her coat?
Do you think Goodwill waits
a while before selling the clothes
of the dead; I mean it’s been almost
a year? Talk about a grace period.
Can you imagine seeing
her coat on some person crossing
the street in front of your car
a day or two after you donated it,
a week or two after she died?
Would you honk
or hit the gas? Or would you just
sit there long after the light
turned green and cry? Yeah,
me, too. A lot of green lights.

*

James Harms is the author of ten books including, most recently, ROWING WITH WINGS (Carnegie Mellon University Press 2017).

Two Poems by Sandra Kohler

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Fall

In a nightmare my husband has converted
to a sect of fundamentalist Christianity and
is insisting I must do so also, otherwise I am
not “in the eyes of God.” It’s fall. The leaves
are falling. In the same dream, my husband’s
walking the dog and I am afraid he will fall.
Volatile fall. I am watching him too closely
and not closely enough. He should be back.
Have I missed the sound of his mother’s
clock striking? What do I miss? Safety.
Something I never had. I can’t imagine
wanting to be in the eyes of God. I want
to be in my husband’s eyes, in his good
graces, in his bed. He’s not at home. He
fell ill, is in the hospital, the ICU, I dream
of watching over him as I can’t these nights.
Waking, seeing my nightmare is dream,
my spirits rise. But he’s absent. It’s
autumn. My spirits fall with the leaves.

*

Seven Years

“It tires her to see the curve of heaven”
Aeneid, Book IV

Why does this line make me think about
my sister? On the seventh anniversary of
her death, I wake thinking of her once more,
of my connections with, my alienation from
her, my anger, my grief, my inability to let
either of them go, let her go, let myself be.

She was seven years older than I, when she
died she was the age I am today, if I died
today, I would be one with her. Just days
ago I found the grey sweater she knitted,
the only garment she ever made that fit me,
that I enjoyed wearing, and find myself

wanting to throw it away, be rid of it. How
to be rid of her? I can’t. If I forgave her,
would I be free? Perhaps I could. Forgive
her for being who she was, for failing me
both when I was a child after mother’s
death, and later, in our adult lives. Yet

I think I’m the one who needs to be
forgiven, for not visiting her in her last
years, the lost years at the end of her life.
Must I forgive her to forgive myself? Is
thinking of forgiving her doing so?
Repeating, retracting, reenacting this
past, present, I am as weary as Dido.

*

Sandra Kohler’s third collection of poems Improbable Music (Word
Press) appeared in May 2011. Earlier collections are The Country of
Women (Calyx, 1995) and The Ceremonies of Longing (University of
Pittsburgh Press, 2003). Her poems have appeared in journals, including
The New Republic, Beloit Poetry Journal, Prairie Schooner, and many
others over the past 45 years. In 2018, a poem of hers was chosen to be
part of Jenny Holzer’s permanent installation at the new Comcast
Technology Center in Philadelphia.

Two Poems by Courtney LeBlanc

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POEM FOR NEW YEAR’S DAY

I’m lucky to have good neighbors, the kind
who pull your garbage bins in when you’re out
of town or gather your mail. This summer
I exchanged cucumbers from my garden
for mint from hers. And to have the kind
of neighbors who deliver a bouquet
of bright yellow buttercups when my dad
died, with a note filled with such kindness
I started crying all over again. And isn’t
that what the world needs right now, a little
more kindness? Because last night the ball
dropped and everyone held their breath
and made a wish, the world collectively hoping
that this year will be better than the last.
I started the first day of this new year with
a long walk with my dog, her anxiety
non-existent on these empty country roads.
And the few cars that passed contained
people who raised their palms in hello,
greeting me as if we were old friends, as if
they would happily accept cucumbers
from my garden, grab the package
at my front door, and deliver compassion
in the face of grief. They waved and I waved
back, this small act of kindness between
strangers, this small bit of hope carrying
us into the new year.

*

FOR MY SISTER, WHO TURNED 40 ELEVEN DAYS AFTER OUR FATHER DIED

We planned on Ireland, a week of lush
green and rolling hills, castles and seductive,
indecipherable accents. I would drive
and you would navigate. We’d hike and drink
Guinness, laugh and sleep late. Instead
we took turns holding our father’s hand,
the hum of the hospital and piped-in
Muzak, the soundtrack. After a week, we
brought him home, moved him close
to the picture window in the living room,
let the sun shine onto his skin as he gulped
for air and I pushed morphine into his cheek.
When he died we circled around his bed,
touched his cooling skin, wiped our tears
on the white sheets. Our father never left
the country, never had a passport, never
graduated high school. He left
the adventuring to us, his two youngest
daughters, the ones who flew farthest
from the nest. Let’s pull out calendars
and make plans. We’ll go next year,
or in five. We’ll explore the whole damn
world, we’ll see everything he never did.

*

Courtney LeBlanc is the author of Beautiful & Full of Monsters (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press), chapbooks All in the Family (Bottlecap Press) and The Violence Within (Flutter Press). She is also the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Riot in Your Throat, an independent poetry press. She loves nail polish, tattoos, and a soy latte each morning. Read her publications on her blog: www.wordperv.com. Follow her on twitter: @wordperv, and IG: @wordperv79.