​Attersee, by Lynne Kemen

On Lake Attersee, by Gustav Klimt (Austria) 1900

​Attersee
 
Green lake water.
The ripples moving like daubs of paint
in the late afternoon.
 
The hotel is a revision of my
earlier imagination. It mirrors
something from sixty years ago.
The porch is mangled, as is the garden.
 
We are here, all four of us,
which rarely happens now.
My sisters wear the same jeans they wore at twenty,
or try to. They borrow my cardigans,                                                                                            
asking first this time.
 
The dock holds us the way it did.
Our legs dangle over water
that shows four faces back,
each of us looking at our own.

Lynne Kemen

​Lynne Kemen lives in Upstate New York. Her full-length book of poetry, Shoes for Lucy, was published by the SCE Press in 2023. Her chapbook, More Than a Handful was published in 2020. Her work is anthologized in Seeing Things (2020) and What We See on Our Journeys (2021), The Memory Palace: an ekphrastic anthology (2024), and Seeing Things, 2 (2024). Lynne is the President of the Board of Bright Hill Press. She is also an editor for the Blue Mountain Review and a lifetime member of The Southern Collective Experience; she is a board member of The Southern Collective Community Outreach and of The Franklin Free Library.