“It is not much to go on, I know.” – Ada Limón
Once it was a woman who stayed with me, not knowing
I’d been thinking hard about a razor blade
in the bathroom cabinet. For nearly all that year
it was just that Lake Erie, the smallest of the Greats
hadn’t left overnight, still lapped at my shred of beach.
For two years, I tried to be it for my sister.
That still stands for something though little
is left of it, her ashes I keep meaning to scatter
on Sippo Lake after twenty years on my shelf.
Unlike some of my friends, birds just don’t
do it for me, but this year, my first in fifty
with no family reunion on the Fourth of July,
it was Karen’s invitation to her large backyard.
I try to be it, call Kim to say she’ll be okay
if she can’t have children, though I have no proof.
I drive the asylum seeker five hours to her next
safe space. I can’t pray, so I try to be
a prayer in motion. Not much, I know.
I do go on.
Diane Kendig‘s latest books are Woman with a Fan: and Prison Terms, and she co-edited the tribute anthology, In the Company of Russell Atkins. Kendig led a prison writing workshop for 18 years and now curates Cuyahoga County Public Library’s weblog “Read + Write” and writes on the streets for “Free Poetry Cleveland.”