Issue Twenty-Seven - Winter 2016

Hairpin

By Chet Corey

A common hairpin appears on my bathroom
tile floor. I bend to pick it up.
So out of season. She went away early fall.
How could her winter signature
suddenly appear, like a word through a tear.
I remember how I would take a
hairpin from her hair as reverently as a nun
would remove at Mass an errant
crumb of Eucharist from altar table linen.

Copyright Corey 2016

Chet Corey 's poetry has previously appeared in SHARK REEF and most recently in Common Ground Review, Studio One, The Talking Stick and in the antholgy Naming Hope (The Benedictine Center of Saint Paul's Monastery, 2019).

All work by