The magnolia’s petals are splendidly pink,
and the turtles here
have lined up on a log that juts over the pond
as sunlight falls through the slanting reeds.
I miss those mornings when you tossed up the tea bag
in an arc and aimed it to land in your cup
and that time you showed me how to hold–
–to hold the imaginary cue stick so you could teach me
how to win at pool. All those nights we spent
ranking the screw-top wines we drank.
Here minnows swim with dark fluency; they send ripples
from just below the surface, as you are doing to me now,
and barn swallows arc through the lambent air –
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 24, Issue 6.
Bonnie Naradzay leads poetry salons at a day shelter for homeless people and also at a retirement community, both in Washington DC. Poems are in AGNI, New Letters (Pushcart nomination), RHINO, Kenyon Review online, Tampa Review, Florida Review online, EPOCH, The American Journal of Poetry, and others. While in graduate school, she took a class that Robert Lowell taught: “The King James Bible as English Poetry.” In 2010 she was awarded the New Orleans MFA poetry prize: a month’s stay with Ezra Pound’s daughter Mary in her castle in Northern Italy. While there, she enjoyed having tea with Mary, hearing cuckoos calling during mating season, and hiking in the Dolomites.
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