Tag: Sisters

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.

Two Poems by Cheryl Baldi

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NIGHT LANTERNS

We are here to spread her ashes,
the first cold day of fall
as shadows spill across the bay at sunset.
Six of us, in a boat while others
gather in small groups on the dock
beneath a sky streaked with pastels.
Here, we float her vessel
just west of the island, where
currents carry it toward the salt creeks,
sage green paper crusted
with Marsh Marigold, Rose
Mallow, wildflowers to seed
the space we once inhabited as kids.
Silent, we drift for a while,
and when the bay grows dark,
head home for the usual family gathering,
the familiar stories suddenly held dear.

And late, returning to the bay
we carry with us a dozen night lanterns,
those small hot air balloons we light,
waiting for the heat to build,
their thin paper walls as translucent
as her skin the last weeks of her life.
They sway and bobble along the beach
as though dancing to 50’s music
until one by one lift
into the dark, rising high
above the bay, light flickering,
growing smaller and smaller
before vanishing
in the expanding darkness:
her burial ground, reaching
from the shoals of this island
deep into the sky above.

*

SISTERS

I want to tell you the story
of our sad childhood so you know
the fear you felt was real,
but you’re sleeping, and your hands
are cold, so I tell you instead
the story of the nuns who came
each August to the shore, a dozen
or more, renting the yellow house
with the large, screened porch.
Remember? We were young
and up early, sneaking to the beach
where each morning we’d find them
clapping like children as they
fed gulls or played tag,
running through sand in black
stockings and black shoes,
their long habits puffed
by wind, their veils floppy.
We learned from their joy,
that it comes unbidden
in a moment of surprise,
like your giggles
that shake you from sleep,
awake now long enough
for me to say goodbye.

*

Cheryl Baldi is the author of The Shapelessness of Water. A former Bucks County Poet Laureate and graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, she was a finalist for the Robert Frasier Award for Poetry and The Frances Locke Memorial Poetry Award. A former teacher, free-lance editor, and co-facilitator for community based workshops exploring women’s lives through literature, she lives in Bucks County and along the coast in New Jersey.