Classic and Contemporary Poetry
EMIGRATION, by LISA DOMINGUEZ ABRAHAM First Line: Last week I scrubbed yellow shadows Subject(s): United States - Foreign Population; Women | ||||||||
Last week I scrubbed yellow shadows from my bedroom wall, erasing the last traces of wedding pictures carefully stored away. For a moment, emptiness felt clean. But each night as my children turn through sleep, I dream I am my grandmother raising a lantern as she crosses a wet field in Zacatecas to bargain with a ghost for the gold it guards. It's 1910. Yesterday government soldiers slaughtered all her chickens, sliced the corn field with bayonets. Tonight her daughters shiver in the barn and pray. I'm frightened, feeling my legs inside her skirts until courage contracts to a metallic taste on my tongue. Coiled around a filthy sack in a shallow cave, the ghost lets me grab just a handful of gold and wake up, gripping my own thumbs. Guitarrons thrum from the clock-radio. On folded newspapers, three paint cans. I'll pry open the lids, stir lilac, white and green, then paint my walls with pictographs - a band of women traveling toward a country they've never seen. Copyright © Lisa Dominguez Abraham http://www.unl.edu/schooner/psmain.htm Prairie Schooner is a literary quarterly published since 1927 which publishes original stories, poetry, essays, and reviews. Regularly cited in the prize journals, the magazine is considered one of the most prestigious of the campus-based literary journals. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...ARISTOTLE TO PHYLLIS by JOHN HOLLANDER A WOMAN'S DELUSION by SUSAN HOWE JULIA TUTWILER STATE PRISON FOR WOMEN by ANDREW HUDGINS THE WOMEN ON CYTHAERON by ROBINSON JEFFERS TOMORROW by ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD LADIES FOR DINNER, SAIPAN by KENNETH KOCH GOODBYE TO TOLERANCE by DENISE LEVERTOV MONUMENT MOUNTAIN by WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT THE ANGELUS; HEARD AT THE MISSION DOLORES IN SAN FRANCISCO, 1868 by FRANCIS BRET HARTE |
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