Dining Room Overlooking the Garden (The Breakfast Room) It reminds me of my family. Only half the table spreads beneath the window: glass of wine, pyramid of plums, pottery bowl and creamer arranged next to a basket of bread. You’d expect the whole table. And why does the blue striped cloth fold toward us as peonies scatter along the wallpaper like firecrackers? My mother sits there in the shadows while Father slumps in a chair, his face turned away toward the window. He’s grown tired of domestic detritus, the artillery of leaves, claustrophobic battles of mothers and daughters among china platters. Beyond the narrow room stretches the storm cloud of his nearing death. Soon the table will tip and crumble. Death’s hand hovers over pears. Geraldine Connolly Geraldine Connolly is a native of western Pennsylvania and the author of three poetry collections: Food for the Winter (Purdue), Province of Fire (Iris Press) and Hand of the Wind (Iris Press), as well as a chapbook, The Red Room (Heatherstone Press). She is the recipient of two N.E.A. creative writing fellowships in poetry, a Maryland Arts Council fellowship, and the W.B. Yeats Society of New York Poetry Prize. She was the Margaret Bridgman Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and has had residencies at Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and The Chautauqua Institute. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Cortland Review and Shenandoah. It has been featured on The Writers Almanac and anthologized in Poetry 180: A Poem a Day for American High School Students, Sweeping Beauty: Poems About Housework and The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide. She lives in Tucson, Arizona. Her website is http: www.geraldineconnolly.com
1 Comment
Ashley Mabbitt
12/10/2017 10:50:33 am
Love that the narrator notices not the entire table is visible.
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