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Finishing Line Press, paper, $12 US

It’s a journey of love and loss that leaves us inspired and changed.
~ Cathy Smith Bowers, author of Traveling In The Time of Danger and The Love That Ended Yesterday in Texas

 

 

Excerpt

Purse Poem, 1985

I stand still as caught prey, praying prey,
as I’m scolded church side in rising heat

and gravel dirt, in that long forgotten dress,
before a morning service and the Lord himself.

Where is your purse? Surely, you must have a purse.
My humpback grandmother curved down

over my head, lecturing me soul to dentures
on southern genteel ways⎯⎯

Be prim in a dress! And never without a purse!
On the sin of idle hands laying around

in folded arms or resting in the lips
of waist and hips. I stand still,

hold myself in my hands,
gaze my woman fate.