Issue 5, Winter 2008

Among Renoir's Umbrellas
by Elizabeth Kate Switaj

I am the one who has given up mourning
My dress is as gray
                    My collar as black
          as all of you wear
         (and gentlemen's hats
under your arches that signify mourning

      dark skin stretched over steel bones
                           or whale bones

I even cover my picnic black
little sandwiches only for society of hands
of my red-haired daughter and smaller hoop-runner
who covers gold hair in blue

                           -r than sky that for which you mourn, divide
                       yourself from these gray clouds
                        and all their fleeting diamonds
  that even wash old blood