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BLUE RAINCOAT
I.
Frayed cuffs
oily collar
belt hanging loose
back loop
gone
I’m twenty
again
behind the wheel
the Blue Ford Fairmont.
I open my eyes
newborn
see my mother
disappear
under the weight
of a house
sinking through the screen door
she labors
hunched
beneath a slate blue
raincoat
a filthy scrap of sky
II.
Bruises say shoulder
but like blue ink
on ecru Crane paper
they bleed through
into back, elbow.
Two black eyes
another bruise
single parenthesis
beside
her pink-lipsticked mouth.
When words disappeared,
paper softened into cloth.
She wove it, wore it,
a coat, a blue coat.
To Top
~
SOLITAIRE 1975
Afternoons
all edge
glare
Mornings
gauzy
sleep-slur
forgot
Evenings
porchlight
yellow
cocktails
hours off
Afternoons
Concentration
Jeopardy
sitcoms
soaps
Four to six
blank stretch
before
his car in the drive
scotch and water
dinner
How was your
day
Afternoons
for hours
she’d play
~
SWIMMING LESSONS
Pool deck encampments
chaise lounges
mother islands
of snacks towels lotion
Children run off
return
Lesson time:
mothers perch
on edge
stir chlorine bluegreen water
over bare ankles
My mother
cat’s-eye sunglasses
skirted suit
robin’s egg
never got in
never learned to swim
saw that I did
Beneath a skin of morning light
beneath the blue surface
my splashing limbs
my thrashing heart
my weightless drop
to liquid silence
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About the Poet
Anne Agnes Colwell, a poet and fiction writer, is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Delaware. Her work has appeared in several journals, including: California Quarterly, Mudlark, Evansville Review, Phoebe, Eclectic Literary Forum, Southern Poetry Review, Stickman Review, Poetry Bay, and Octavo. An online chapbook of her poems appears in The Alsop Review. Her first book of poems, Believing Their Shadows, has been a finalist for the University of Wisconsin‚s Brittingham Prize, the Anhinga Prize, New Issues Poetry Prize and the Quarterly Review of Literature. Her critical book, Inscrutable Houses: Metaphors of the Body in the Poems of Elizabeth Bishop, was published by the University of Alabama Press in 1997. She received an Established Artist Award in Poetry and an Emerging Artist Award in Fiction from the Delaware State Arts Council. She lives in Milton, Delaware with her husband James Keegan and son, Thomas. |
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