Tag: widow

Four Poems by Jacqueline Jules

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Advice for the New Widow

Dare I tell the truth
to the new widow freshly home
from the funeral, still busy
with condolence cards
and financial matters?

That she’ll feel his absence
even more acutely next year
and the year after that.

When his dreadful last days
have dimmed and instead of bedpans
and speckled hospital gowns,
she can see him in his floppy sun hat
grinning with the grandkids on the beach.

Yes, she’ll be able to eat dinner at 4 or 9,
whenever she wants, whatever she wants.
Choose a sofa without a dissenting opinion.
Leave the house without explanation.

And on good days
she’ll savor the freedom
almost as much as she aches at night
without sweet chatter before bed
and the weight of his body beside her.

*

Chatting with Alexa

In a quiet house,
I chat with Alexa.

Will it be cloudy today?
What does “laconic” mean?

Did the Berlin Wall fall in 1989 or 1987?

Alexa is happy to be asked anything.

And she repeats answers without griping.

Alexa knows just what to play
when I want peppy songs
with my morning coffee.

And if I slip in the kitchen
I can tell her to call for help.

She responds so quickly.

All I have to do is say her name
and there is another voice
in the house speaking to me.

No matter how artificial.

Still an exchange of words.

Needed exercise
for my vocal cords.

*

At My Father’s Last Seder

He didn’t hold court
from the host’s seat
at the far end of joined tables,
set with china and crystal,
his voice carrying over 25 heads.

He didn’t make us wait, stomachs
rumbling for matzah ball soup,
while he expanded the Exodus story,
stalling the Seder every few pages,
soliciting answers to questions he posed.

He was a guest at his daughter’s table,
nodding from time to time.

I think of him as I leave
my senior apartment
for my son’s spacious home,
with only a bottle of wine.

The cakes and kugels I once
prepared not needed at this Seder.

My own era of importance waning.

*

My Grandson Wins Monopoly

My ten-year-old grandson spends
his pint-sized money gleefully.
Buying every property on the board.

The little green houses
aren’t enough for him.
He upgrades to hotels,
betting I’ll land on his Park Place
and be charged exorbitant rent.

Afraid to be so reckless, I hoard
my paper dollars. Pass up properties
that are too expensive.

It doesn’t save me.

I still get stuck paying a $100 Luxury Tax
or sent to a jail with a Chance Card.

On top of that, I’m slow to calculate
the dice, squinting at the black dots
on the small white squares.

My grandson sees the number instantly.
Points to the space I need to move
my tiny silver dog.

We don’t discuss my deliberate manner
versus his aggressive one.

And as we play, I wonder,
if he can teach me to take chances,
move forward on my own.

*

Jacqueline Jules is the author of The Golden Key to the Garden (Bottlecap Press, 2026), Manna in the Morning (Kelsay Books, 2021), Itzhak Perlman’s Broken String, winner of the 2016 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize from Evening Street Press, and Smoke at the Pentagon: Poems to Remember (Bushel & Peck, 2023). Visit her online at jacquelinejules.com

Five Poems by Faith Shearin

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Poem for the Recluses

In this poem Charles Darwin installs a mirror
outside his study window, so he can glimpse
visitors making their way up his driveway.

And Shirley Jackson, ostracized
by the citizens of Bennington,
stays inside with her typewriter

and tranquilizers. Let us leave
Emily Dickinson in the company
of her hills, and her big dog, Carlo, pressing

ghost pipe into a thick herbarium.
Edward Gorey wears a long fur coat
and disappears into a Cape Cod cottage

where he collects doorknobs, and photographs
of dead Victorian babies, and daydreams
amid the raccoons who drift down from his attic.

JD Salinger publishes The Catcher in the Rye,
then slips into the woods
of New Hampshire and refuses

to give interviews, while Harper Lee explains
that it’s better to be silent than to be a fool.
Emily Brontë, thin and fevered,

avoids the poisoning doctors
and wanders alone through the marshes
that follow the bend of a glen

through the misty darkness
past chapel bells ringing
and a murmur of trees.

*

At Ninety-Nine My Grandmother Refuses to Put Away her Winter Clothes

When my aunt came to haul the winter clothes
up to the attic my grandmother folded her hands
in her lap and shook her head
for she did not want to pack away

all the winters of her life: her childhood in the Victorian
on Queen Street where the water froze in the basin
and a pot of oatmeal bubbled on a wood stove,
the night when my grandfather drove her home

from a New Year’s Eve party, his hand
in hers, the stars cold. She didn’t want to fold up
that first Christmas after the war when the pond
filled with ice skaters and a distant cousin played

Silent Night on an upright piano in the parlor,
or the one afterward, when she felt my mother
quickening beneath her ribs. She did not
want the season to change, did not admire

the whitening dogwoods or the papery petals
of the crape myrtles. The longer light,
she knew, was not for her.

*

The Realtor

His last name was Loveless and he had been married three times,
each of his wives dying young, leaving him

perpetually widowed. He was a patient, handsome man
who did not mind driving all day to see houses

we were unlikely to buy. He took us to see remote homesteads
and farmhouses with barns and cellars, ushered

us down shadowy, abandoned dirt roads.
When I tried to send him a Christmas card

the year after we signed our closing papers
I called his office and discovered

he had died. But that dappled afternoon
when he first showed us the cabin — the last

earthly realm where we would dwell together — we stood
in a living room with floor to ceiling windows

and looked out at the glittering valley and the outline
of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which were lush and green

by day but, at night, turned cold and bony
and floated in a lake of stars.

*

Across a Bridge

One night, when I was nineteen, I drove across a bridge
with both the men I would love

in my back seat, the Connecticut River slithering
beneath us. This was early winter — first snow

of the season blown over the road — and we were
on our way to eat pizza in a dark booth with a Wurlitzer.

These were the same streets I’d walk again as a widow
thirty years later — still winter —

as if there had never been any other season.

*

We Were a Bachelor and a Widow

We were a bachelor and a widow renting a studio
across from an inn that hosted weddings.
For two mild years, while we read Sebastian Barry

by lantern light and cooked fried fish with potatoes,
we watched brides and grooms come and go
until they became interchangeable — hydrangeas,

veils, towering ivory cakes, bridesmaids.
He never wanted marriage — that mingling
of money and love — and my own union had ended

sadly, in a windowless hospital room —
my husband’s wedding ring removed
by surgeons — and, still, men with champagne flutes

relieved themselves in our forest, and the big band music
went on, wafting out of the tent, in summer
and early fall, before the long darkness.

*

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 appeared in: The Sun, New Ohio Review, The Missouri Review, The Florida Review, and Literal Latte, among others. Her novel, Lost River, 1918 won the YA Global Fiction Prize and has been published in the US and UK by Leapfrog Press. A new novel, One Life on Land, won the Uplift Voices Award and is forthcoming in October 2026 from Jaded Ibis Press.

widow by john compton

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widow

she danced
so ferally

the twirl
ripped

a boy
from her

skin—
a stork

flung
from his mouth.

she reached out
but both were gone.

the flowers
cut themselves

& arranged
for a eulogy.

*

john compton (b. 1987) is a gay poet who is the author of 20 books/chapbooks, who lives in kentucky with his husband josh and their dogs and cats, and mice. his latest full length book is “my husband holds my hand because i may drift away & be lost forever in the vortex of a crowded store” published with Flowersong Press (dec 2024); his new full length book “house as a cemetery” published with Rebel Satori Press (march 2026) & is nominated for the national book award.

Five Poems by Andrea Potos

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THE FRIENDSHIP

The week
when she wrote:

You and I will
explore Truth together,

my heart
signed on instantly:

Yes,
though nothing followed–

they were words
only, after all;

I who am one who believes
in words, words

have rescued my life, after all.
Some say words are cheap;

I say, they
are costlier than you know.

*

SADNESS IS ON ITS WAY

I can hear the foghorns,
skies a drizzled mist,
clouds sodden
with grey weight
as if with so much
to let go of,
so much to say.

*

THE MOMENT I SENSED MY MOTHER WAS LEAVING

Standing in the mist-
drizzled green of Connemara,
the Wild Atlantic Way thousands of miles
from my mother in the rehab home,
I called to make sure she knew
I’d be back in four days.
I needed to ask her
how she was that morning– her voice
weakened and crackling across the vastness–
Just fair, she said,
Unable, for the first time in my life,
to offer the reassurance
for the daughter she loved so well-
it was then I knew.

*

WHEN MY WIDOWER NEIGHBOR INVITES ME
TO COME AND TAKE WHATEVER I WANT
FROM HIS WIFE’S WARDROBE

Three dressing rooms of voluminous wonder,
ballroom gowns, brocaded jackets
and scarves, leather purses and shoes,
and dressers filled with nightwear and tops.
I browsed and lingered, stayed for nearly an hour.
When I opened the deepest mahogany drawer, I found
a pale pink sweater, cloud-soft,
patterned all over with lipstick prints.
I thought of my mother, all the years
of her beloved Revlon shades.
I might have felt her then
tap my shoulder: Here is some love
from me honey–take it–
and I did.

*

WHEN OUR FAVORITE RESTAURANT CLOSES
         for Mom

Though you’ve been gone
nearly ten years now,
I’d drive the eighty miles
to go there–the glass doors still
opening for both of us.
I’d order our coffee
in their thick ceramic mugs,
then slices of their legendary
blueberry pie for take-home–
heaping with plump berries,
no crust on top, cold, with clouds
of whipped cream for later.
Each bite would remind me.
Now I must find
another place for us–
I want a location to point to,
to say, here, Mom, let’s go together,
I’ll pick you up at noon.

*

Andrea Potos is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Two Emilys (Kelsay Books) and Her Joy Becomes (Fernwood Press). A new collection entitled The Presence of One Word is forthcoming later in 2025. Recent poems can be found in CALYX Journal, Presence, New York Times Book Review, Earth’s Daughters, and Poem. You can find her at andreapotos.com

Two Poems by Lynn Glicklich Cohen

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Another Sparrow

Another sparrow
hits glass, flies away
stunned to die
like the husband
of a woman I knew, a pillar
of his community. Left her
with five children
and gambling debts.

After the first few
I call a service
that installs peel and paste
film sheets in patterns
birds can see the way
we see guard rails
or blinking arrows—
row of white dots, dashes
a coded message
on every pane.

They tell me my brain
will adapt and I’ll stop seeing
them. I don’t have that kind
of time or faith
in what I’m told.
So I move the feeders further
from the house, hoping
for fewer dead birds,
feathers in flower beds.

I wonder if the woman
whose husband died
ever stops wondering
where he thought
he was going.

*

You Still Can

A peach pink line cuts through the sky at dusk,
a plane coming in for a sunset landing, so many
humans having been somewhere else. If I were not
already here, I’d want to be home.

I don’t travel anymore. I make excuses:
the cost, my dog, flying, inconvenience, discomfort.
It’s gotten embarrassing, like the clatter
of empty bottles, their skinny necks, residual fumes.

I awake with a spider-legged dread.
I belong in a story they won’t let me forget.
Another gathering of Jews bullet-sprayed.
Ancestral warnings. Shocked not surprised.

Hiding is one way to survive but no way
to live. I stay home, sweep crumbs, feed
the dog, pay bills. I fold sheets, make toast.
A plane? You mean you can go anywhere?

*

Lynn Glicklich Cohen is a poet from Milwaukee, WI. A once-upon-a-time social worker, a perennial cellist and semi-retired Rolfer, her poems have been published in Brushfire Literature and Arts Journal, Birmingham Arts Journal, Cantos, El Portal, Evening Street Review, Front Range Review, Grand Journal, Oberon, ONE ART, Peregrine, The Midwest Quarterly, The Phoenix, The Red Wheelbarrow, St. Katherine’s Review, Thin Air Magazine, Trampoline, Whistling Shade, and others. www.lynnglicklichcohenpoet.com

Three Poems by Terri Kirby Erickson

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Ballet Class

I tried not to envy the ponytailed waifs
in my ballet class whose ten-year-old bodies
weighed less than dandelions.

I was as thin as they were, but my limbs
were like lead weights compared
to the willow branches of their arms, the bird-

like bones in legs that seemed stronger,
lighter—able to pirouette and plié
with so much ease. At least I make good grades

in school, I’d say to myself while holding
on to the barre like a ship’s mainmast
in a roiling sea. But I knew the ballet teachers

expected better of me—the only daughter
of a Prima Ballerina. It didn’t take long,
however, to see I had none of my mother’s talent.

I would never leap into the air and land like a swan
on the water, dip and sway like a sapling
in the wind. Though I liked wearing the black

leotard and pink tights, my soft, peony-colored
shoes, I couldn’t bend and touch
my toes, let alone twirl on them. So I shed

the ballet slippers and took up writing—
hoping to pen one day, a pirouetting poem,
a pas de chat of words that danced across a page.

*

Woman on the Beach

The woman pacing the rocky beach is no ghost
but a mother whose little boy rose
from his bed and wandered down to the water

while his parents were sleeping. Not quite three,
her only child was red-cheeked and plump
as a baby penguin, with black curls and a winning

smile that made his mother’s heart thump
in her thin chest just to think of it. She knew
he was gone but year after year she rented the same

cottage on the same shore on the same day her boy
disappeared—presumed drowned they said—
and now she is old. Widowed, white-headed

and frail, her body is blown this way and that by
the wind, but still she walks and sometimes
calls his name as if any minute, he’ll come running,

his flushed skin hot against her own cool flesh,
wriggling like a puppy that wants down but she will
not put him down. She will hold him

in her arms and keep him safe like she didn’t do
before, though nothing she says or does
or prays for will ever wake her from a sleep so deep

she never heard his feet hit the floor or the screen
door slam or his cries for help, her beautiful
boy whose mother failed him.

* 

How to Shop with Your Mother

Never make her feel like she’s slowing
you down. Even when she meanders

into the shoe department, running her
hands over the soft leather, admiring

one pair or another for what seems like
forever, you do have time to wait. Then,

when the funeral director tells you they
need clothes for her to wear, a pair of

shoes, you will not open your mother’s
closet door and find, jumbled into a pile,

her worn out sandals, dress shoes with
dented heels, her faded thin-soled flats—

and feel such a wave of sorrow you can’t
catch your breath. You won’t be the one

who hurried her mother along, who kept
on sighing because she was holding you

up when there were so many places you
needed to go and things you needed to do.

*

Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry, including Night Talks: New & Selected Poems (Press 53), which was a finalist for (general) poetry in the International Book Awards and the Best Book Awards. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of literary journals, anthologies, magazines, and newspapers, including “American Life in Poetry,” Asheville Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, JAMA, Poetry Foundation, Rattle, The SUN, The Writer’s Almanac, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse Daily, and many more. Among her numerous awards are the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, Nautilus Silver Book Award, Tennessee Williams Poetry Prize, and the Annals of Internal Medicine Poetry Prize. She lives in North Carolina.

Four Poems by Barbara Crooker

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THE O IN WIDOW

is empty, a room with no windows.
The lifeless moon in a bleak sky.
The hollow in your throat I used to kiss.
A deep well, without a wish.
Without.
Where there used to be a couple,
the deep division of negative numbers.
The unused chair at the kitchen table.
The vast Sahara of one side of the bed.
The air in my hand as I reach out for yours.
The shape of my mouth when grief
sneaks up and takes me unaware.
The heartless dawn with you still gone.

*

AVOID THE IMPOSSIBLE QUESTION
It takes the form of ‘How are you?’ or “How are you doing?’
        Dr. Joyce Brothers

Pretend you have hearing loss.
Bend down and tie your double-knotted
shoes. Ignore the question; instead, ask one—
people love to talk about themselves.
Don’t even think about how you really are,
which is lost. Bereft. Adrift. A shell
tumbling in the tide. A crust of bread,
not the whole loaf. An empty glass,
the residue of wine. The real answer:
still here, though I wish I was gone.

*

CHRISTMAS WITHOUT YOU

I no longer make fruitcake—those garish
cherries, sticky chunks of glacéed pineapple,
candied peel—snug in their bed of dark spiced
cake. No one but you ever liked it. And I’m not
capable of walking in the ice-crusted woods
to chop down (really, saw) a fragrant tree,
wrestle it on top of the car, then lug it inside,
water it daily on hands and knees. Instead,
an artificial tree, pre-lit with tiny lights,
does its best to brighten these dark nights.
Where I sit in front of the fire, alone,
with my solitary glass of wine. The stocking
you sewed for me the first year we were
together hangs empty. As does yours,
felt cut-outs sewn by your mother when you
were two. There are no presents to wrap
or gifts to hide. The cookies are unbaked.
Roasts untrimmed. Just the silence of the snow,
the flame from a single candle. The longest
night of the year.

*

MAY YOUR MEMORIES BRING YOU COMFORT

Those were the words I’d often used when writing condolence
cards. But when I lost you, my beloved, I found I’d also lost
my memories. Not all of them, but the order of things:
when we met for dancing that night at the bar, was it before or after
the spaghetti dinner? What was the name of the restaurant in Lyon
that brought us a bowl of mousse au chocolat big enough to swim in,
and said, “Help yourself?” In which park in Paris did we find the horse
chestnut now resting in the shadow box? We used to joke, on our travels,
that together we made up a five-year-old. Who am I now, as I try
to traverse this difficult world without you?

*

Barbara Crooker is author of twelve chapbooks and nine full-length books of poetry. Some Glad Morning, Pitt Poetry Series, University of Pittsburgh Poetry Press, longlisted for the Julie Suk award from Jacar Press, is her latest. Her previous collection, The Book of Kells, won the Best Poetry Book of 2019 Award from Poetry by the Sea. Her other awards include: Grammy Spoken Word Finalist, the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council fellowships in literature. Her work appears in literary journals and anthologies, including The Bedford Introduction to Literature.

Two Poems by Jennifer L Freed

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Gravity

                  Grief
pulls you close.
You know it too well
to think you can live without it.
You’ve learned
it is a chair that will hold you
up and ask nothing
of you but to live
with it. And so you live

through this spring day, drifting
from bureau to bed,
table to desk, touching
the shirt, the pillow, the cup,
the book; looking
out the window,
your hand on the windowsill, the sun
on your hand. Here is the view
so changed from yesterday. Here

is the blue of the veins in your wrist.
You can do nothing
and are grateful
there is nothing you need to do.
You let yourself sink
into your chair, let
the chair
hold you.

*

Widowed

Some days, she chooses not
to eat.
She needs to let absence
fill her body, to move with it, know
that she can.

On the table, fresh strawberries, radiant
in their blue bowl.

Without meals, extra pockets of time
unfold. She turns toward
books, sketch pads, longer walks
with the dog. Hunger swells, fades, swells and fades
again.

By night, stomach growling, she feels surprisingly
strong. She looks forward
to morning, when, standing at the counter, she will inhale
the scent of toasting bread.

*

Jennifer L Freed lives in Massachusetts. Her poetry has appeared in Atlanta Review, Atticus Review, Rust + Moth, West Trestle Review, The Worcester Review, Zone 3, and other journals. Her poem sequence “Cerebral Hemorrhage” was awarded the 2020 Samuel Washington Allen Prize (New England Poetry Club). She is the author of a chapbook, These Hands Still Holding, a finalist in the 2013 New Women’s Voices chapbook contest, and of a full length collection, When Light Shifts (Kelsay, 2022), based on the aftermath of her mother’s stroke.