poem index


Carmen Giménez Smith

Printer-friendly version

by this poet

We make dogma out of letter writing: the apocryphal story 
of Lincoln who wrote angry letters he never sent. We wait for letters 
for days and days. Someone tells me I'll write you a letter
and I feel he's saying you're different than anyone else.
Distance's buzz gets louder and louder. It gets to
My siblings and I archive the blanks in my mother’s memory, 
diagnose her in text messages. And so it begins, I write although 
her disease had no true beginning, only a gradual peeling away 
until she was left a live wire of disquiet. We frame her illness 
as a