Lori Desrosiers
As those of you who scroll through our archives will discover, we have featured many well-known poets as well as emerging poets who are not as well-known but may yet become so. Lori Desrosiers, with her own fine poems and with the many good things she is doing for poetry, is one of the latter group. For all the poetry-lovers and poets in Western Massachusetts she publishes a weekly online Poetry News, without which we would hardly know what is happening in our poetry community. For everyone else – and especially those who still love or are just awakening to the joys of good narrative poetry, which she calls “narrative that sings,” she publishes and edits the journal Naugatuck River Review.
Desrosiers’ own first full-length book of poems, The Philosopher’s Daughter,
is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry in 2012. Her chapbook, Three Vanities,
was published by Pudding House Press in 2009, and she has also published mini-chapbooks of ekphrastic verse, as well as others. Her poems, including the prize-winning “That Pomegranate Shine,” re-published below, have appeared in many journals and several anthologies. She earned her M.F.A. in Poetry from New England College and currently teaches writing to undergraduates at two local colleges. She lives in Westfield, Massachusetts.
Irene Willis
Poetry Editor
That Pomegranate Shine
Two brides arise from the river, shivering and shining like pomegranate seeds.
– Words from an Armenian Song
I was the wrong kind of bride,
more sweat than glisten,
more peach than pomegranate.
At twenty-three, in love with marriage,
not the man,
I plunged into rough water,
bringing grandmother’s candlesticks,
mother’s books and two silver trays.
Ten years later, I emerged shivering,
dragging my ragged volumes,
one candlestick and two babies.
On the bank, I shook off the water
and breathed.
Standing with my children,
looking out over the river,
the new brides asked me where
I got that pomegranate shine.
Previously appeared on SplitThisRock.com as a Poem of the Week
First Marriage
Act one ended years ago
before this peace, this place.
Calamity ruled the blue house I
dreaded leaving, also staying.
Effort after effort
failed and failed again.
Glad to be gone from that
house, that man, that life.
I am not the same,
just look a bit similar.
Kin to his family still
loving his children, this
man I used to care for.
Not any more, except
only a father who is
pathetic and rather sad.
Quiet now, it is over.
Right here I would like to
stay for a good long
time in this yellow house,
under the tall fir tree.
Violets bloom in the lawn,
wildflowers and peonies. My
ex is mostly forgotten. I sit in my
yard and dream of
zinnias and next year’s blooms.
Sometimes I Hear the Clock Speak
a knock and sequence, hands
unsuccessful, reach for numbers
twelve hovers atop
a round white mountain
long sweeping curve of shrug
a gesture in one direction
the hiccup of a second
the thousand spins of a life.