Irene’s travel credits include the mountains of central Mexico, the red rocks of Arizona and airport bathrooms everywhere. Her work can be found in the (now sadly defunct) Bullfight Review, The Baltimore Review and the occasional literary anthology. Her piece, “So the Lawyer You Married Wants to Devote His Life to Perfecting His Roundhouse Kick” won The Baltimore Review’s 2007 Creative Nonfiction Competition.
We followed her in, a stray, the fattest & first, the temple cat./ In a niche by the altar she crouches, watches them come: the/ mad parade we’d wanted, this troupe of heretics — the ass,/ alpaca, gyrfalcon — unbroken line of celebrants, creatures ...
Mother comes to me as I’m making honey cake, / measuring out sugar then whipping eggs. / Never mind that Mother left this earth / eighteen months earlier...
I miss things: swooping, diving, passionate voices/ in several African tongues, so far beyond me/ they might as well have beamed from the constellations.
Here’s the river I stepped in more than twice.// I can’t see them but I know the boats/ are going by in the sturdy fog...
And now you explore the hidden pockets and come up/ with a City Guide (in English) you picked up in Amsterdam./ Why did I keep that? Where were we going? But she’s/ not there to answer
Read more Poetry or Postcard Prose
