Sample Poems by Christine Higgins, Ann LoLordo, Madeleine Mysko, and Kathleen O'Toole

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In the Ofuro

She leads me into the tiled room.
Seated on a stool, she opens the spigot
and fills a small bucket.
Dipping a cloth, she soaps her body
and gestures me to do the same.
I nearly fall off the stool;
it is so small and low.
I lather underarms, breasts,
belly, between the legs.
I avert my eyes and concentrate
on folds of flesh.

She stands, moves towards me
and begins to wash my back,
scrubbing shoulders,
passing the warm cloth
down my spine, over the hips
to the coccyx. Then a flood
spills down my back
from her bucket. She offers
me the cloth and returns to
her stool. I wash her skin,
the nape of her neck, the delicate
black hair circling like a thumbprint.

The bath is gray and solitary
this morning and the window sweats.
We are two hothouse flowers,
yellow day lily and calla
blooming in the heat.
Clean now, she motions me
to the big tiled tub. We soak,
steam circling our heads.
Side by side, we barely touch.

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Handkerchief

At the funeral of a colleague's wife,
I'm surprised to find it folded neatly
in the side pocket of my bag-tissue-thin cotton,
machine-scalloped edge, printed with flowers
that could be jonquils if they weren't so
impossibly blue-green, no doubt manufactured
in the fifties, but pressed upon me not along ago
by my mother, who found it too pretty
to leave behind in the consignment shop,
who must have carried it home, washed it,
laid it to dry against the side of the tub,
and ironed it into this soft and perfect square
smelling mildly of soap, which I hold
against my cheeks now, blotting the tears.

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At Mount Edith Cavell Lake

My body lays itself down
on the edge of the lake.
Fresh tracks nearby.
Big- horned sheep or bear.
The bugle of an elk.
Here my body lays itself down,
impatient with life's slow pace.
Our lies swirl in the air,
repeated with each denial,
and my body lays down
as the lake beckons.
Glacial blue and steaming
it seems to call:
Forgive yourself,
the self you have become,
the ache in your side,
the self no one knows,
the stone in your mouth.
Only then will he return
to enter the pure wound of my body.

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Grief

after "A Visual AIDS Diary" by Devorah Kleinbeast

They named it for the aftermath: gravis-
that heaviness. But looking back, wouldn't
you agree: The moment you would name-
the moment you first realized the loss-

was geological (the way the heart
shifted, fractured at the fault), and astral
(faith and hope and love exploding weightless,
spectacularly in, and of, the air)?

Splinters of song, showers of fragrant light.
Too bad you haven't got a photograph
to mount and frame in gold. But still, sometimes
against a perfect dark, haven't you seen
it floating by? The birth of Grief: that star.