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.