Today, thanks to the editors at Literary Mama—a fine journal that “publishes literary writing about the many faces of motherhood”—my poem Snow Angels appears in its January 2017 issue.

I wrote this poem almost a year ago, just after a terrible, daylong snowstorm swept through New England and I learned of its aftermath. Between the heavy snow and winds, Massachusetts and Rhode Island were battered. I scratched out sentences that evening. It was a hard poem to write because it’s a mother’s response to two different, yet interconnected, tragic events. I sent it out prematurely, I knew it wasn’t ready, and it was rejected by a few literary journals. Harder it was to cut—and I knew it was necessary as it was too long—but with feedback from a few good and faithful writer friends who read it, I was able to slash it nearly in half. And once done, I sent it directly to Literary Mama, because I couldn’t think of a more perfect home for it. I’m so glad they chose to keep it.

Snow Angels

Pearls fell from the sky that day, painted the windows
opalescent, drifted against the front door. Tired
woodland hit silently the snow, and geese
honked overhead in the quiet spaces of a
cloud. In the Northeast, familiar is the weight of
winter. Power soon was lost, cars spun out on roads,
and the trees, the great pines of Canton, as day wore on,
wailed and groaned with burden, and began to spill like
discordant dominoes into yards, streets, over
homes, and upon a little girl, and a father, related
only by chance, two names in the paper, hours apart.

It blustered morning through night where we live…[read more here]