All night we held each other
beside the East River.
It was summer, no blanket.
A parquet floor.
This was Manhattan,
not Chicago.
This was Chicago
in a soothsayer’s outfit.
He was not my father.
It was I who could not sleep,
who blessed the rooms
with holy water.
I’d stayed all night,
the sun on the river
all glittering sequins,
spangles on a gown.
No, that’s not right.
A blanket, a Persian carpet.
It was winter. I heard
a voice commanding
go to him child. It was I
who saw the gun
and stopped the train,
noir heroine
mistaking pity for love,
telling the doctor
I am not his sister
who drowned.
✶✶✶✶
Author of Zorba’s Daughter, winner of the 2010 May Swenson Poetry Award, Moon and Mercury, and two chapbooks: Troubled by an Angel and Out-patients. Heiress will be published by Texas Review Press in the fall of 2018. Publications include The Yale Review, The Southern Review, Field, et al. Currently residing in Alexandria, VA, in her heart she has never left the “city of the big shoulders” where she was born and raised.
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