I’m pleased that one of my pieces, “Honeymoon” was just published in Last Stanza Poetry Journal. The journal is available in hardcover, softcover, and on Kindle. Last Stanza is a beautiful journal, so if you’ve any interest in poetry for yourself or as a gift for someone special, please consider ordering a copy.
The poem:
Honeymoon
Across the Kenyan plains,
armies of fine golden dust
rose and swarmed around every living thing,
clung to skin and lips,
tongue and cornea,
the camera’s shuttered eye.
Who can say when a marriage begins or ends?
There are no dreams here,
she might have thought, no poems.
at night under the mosquito netting,
perhaps she watched his back rise and fall,
didn’t sleep but mourned the years ahead.
Three decades later, she excavated
a brown book of photos, met
a man and a woman, young and familiar,
hats angled away from the dust or each other.
Against a backdrop of zebras grazing,
with elephants walking in the distance,
the two squinted straight into the lens,
the haze already coming between them.
–Melinda Coppola