12 Nov Wondrous by Sarah Freligh
turns to E.B. White, his birthday, and I exit
the here and now of the freeway at rush hour,
travel back into the past, where my mother is reading
to my sister and me the part about Charlotte laying her eggs
and dying, and though this is the fifth time Charlottehas died, my mother is crying again, and we’re laughing
at her because we know nothing of loss and its sad math,
how every subtraction is exponential, how each grief
multiplies the one preceding it, how the author tried
seventeen times to record the words She died alone
without crying, seventeen takes and a short walk during
which he called himself ridiculous, a grown man crying
for a spider he’d spun out of the silk thread of invention —
wondrous how those words would come back and make
him cry, and, yes, wondrous to hear my mother’s voice
ten years after the day she died — the catch, the rasp,
the gathering up before she could say to us, I’m OK.
About the Poet
Sarah Freligh is a poet and fiction writer based in Rochester, NY. She is the author of six books of poetry and short fiction, including Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Prize and the 2015 Whirling Prize from the University of Indianapolis, and the recently-released A Brief Natural History of Women, from Harbor Editions.
Sarah’s work has appeared in the Cincinnati Review miCRo series, SmokeLong Quarterly, the Wigleaf 50, and in the anthologies New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (Norton 2018), and Best Microfiction (2019-22). Among her awards are poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Saltonstall Foundation.
Related Event
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- Sarah Freligh will be the featured reader in the SUNY Buffalo State University Emanuel Fried Reading Series at 12:15 p.m. on Thursday, November 16th in Room 302 of Ketchum Hall on the Buffalo State University Campus. The Drop Hammer Series, which is curated by writer Kim Chinquee, is free and open to the public.
The Poem of the Week feature is curated by literary legacy awardee R.D. Pohl.