Terence Paré
Widow
She warms the sheets with restless feet as he
Had done a thousand times before. Varicose
Prayer, she rolls over against the wall
And clamps a salty pillow to her barren breast.
Enwombed and enwombing, a dry Sargasso Sea, she
Sniffs her searing flesh and the only other
Odor of scotch she sips and slips to sleep.
The last embers' whispers in the brimming ashtray
Echo the Dogwood's antique promise to return.
Bio
I went to Manhattan College, in the Bronx, earned a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, which is not in South America, taught College English for a summer as part of City University's "College Without Walls" program at Rikers Island House of Detention for Man, worked for twenty-five years on Wall Street in mid-town Manhattan, and now live in Larchmont, New York on Fountain Square, which is a square and has a fountain. Previous work has appeared in Poetry, Rhino, and Mandarin Oriental. I have work in the current The Hudson Review and I am writing a novel.