Following a Truck Misread as Grief
Following a Truck Misread as Grief
in midnight fogspray, going home:
when grief, as is its way,
edged in and out of awareness also
Past tidepools, lurking ticks, minkshoals,
hognose, faint blue toadflax tokens,
faded nostalgias stashed
as unprocessed digital images
named only with sequential numbers:
1. A partially excavated ritual bath in a basement,
a mud pit next to the one of the oldest places of worship, its dampness
smelling of elderly practices, shed skins piled in a corner, abandoned
2. A tiled example, empty, newer, but still a century old, deep as a baby's grave,
steep steps leading in, attached to a thin copper pipe, a furnace the size of a fist,
to be filled with gas then lit for heat
No voices but the visitors',
then the docent, explaining, explaining.
Silent, the colorless blown up grainy posters,
the shiny new blue markers pointing
out important sites from history.
Ann Neuser Lederer was born in Ohio and has also lived and worked in surrounding states as a Registered Nurse. Prior to nursing she studied art and earned degrees in Anthropology. Her poetry and nonfiction appear in journals such as Passages North, Blue Fifth Review, Verdad, and Border Crossing; anthologies such as Best of the Net, A Call To Nursing, Pulse, and The Country Doctor Revisited; and in her chapbooks: Approaching Freeze, The Undifferentiated, and Weaning the Babies. Samples of Ann's published work can be viewed at http://ann-neuser-lederer.blogspot.com/.
