Fish Again!

Here's a lovely title for a poem: "My Mother's Dead and Nobody Calls Me Darling Anymore." Dannye Romine Powell expresses the loss of a loved one through the speaker's new habit of calling people "darling" like her mother used to do to her. "No, thank you, darling, to the girl at the door / selling wrapping paper." The juxtaposition of the word as expressed by her mother in the last weeks in the nursing home ("Darling, I'm so happy you're here. Come, / let me look at you, darling.") with the simile of a parakeet landing on the speaker's shoulder is an apt and tender one. This is a fine poem about loss and the ways we try to fill the empty spaces.

Anneliese Finke's poem "To Hal Struthee" is a powerful meditation on the effect our lives leave on the world, a bracing antidote to It's a Wonderful Life. Hal Struthee was a businessman, "part of the state's largest producer / of prosthetic arms and legs." He could empathize with the disabled, his own legs having been taken off by a freight train. "But," Finke says, "what did you do? They'll hire / someone else now, legs or not." This is a startling, unexpected statement. Struthee left behind no children. But what difference would it have made? "We don't live on / in our children[.]" The poem ultimately becomes a harsh repudiation of our legacies. "The things we do / flatten under history, they're / worn away." You don't want to read this during an identity crisis at three in the morning.