Issue Twenty-Two - Summer 2013

Twice Unlucky in Love

By Craig McVay

Twice unlucky in love, Grace
never said a word about the dazzling blue tumors
bubbling in her stomach.
Proud Ohio stock, she disbelieved in doctors.
No hospital, no morphine.

No children.
No money, no will.
She had no truck with banks.
She lies well underground, pale
in the cheapest pine casket the cousins could find
at Franklin’s Funeral Services.
No stone. No flowers.

Her name blows silent in the blue August film
that drifts in the fields.

The boys and girls trudge row to row,
detasseling corn.

You step over her when you go to plant lilies
at your wife’s black granite gravestone.

Copyright McVay 2013

Craig McVay , a retired high school English and Latin teacher, has poems or stories in, among others, The Avatar Review, Blue Unicorn, Icon, Pudding Magazine, The Teacher's Voice, and Everything Stops and Listens, an anthology published by the Ohio Poetry Association. For many years, he was coordinator of the series, Peripatetic Poets, in Columbus, Ohio. He teaches English to Somali immigrants and is studying Somali at The Ohio State University.

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