Kate Gleason
Reading Darwin While My Father Dies

too sad to sleep but writing nightly

in her journal, its spine broken

from opening, poem after poem
of sitting vigil at his side

while brain cancer began
subtracting him in fractions,
teaching her

how something can go into nothing
and still leave a remainder,
that winter she learned
the long slow division
of his body

from the earth,
this math a language
we couldn't understand,
because we still had years
to discover grief is cumulative,
each loss added to the last,
a sequence of Fibonacci numbers
that compound and accrue,

or how long it takes
for sadness
to spiral out of itself,
like ferns uncurling
from their fetal position,
or the tesserae-ed mosaic
in a sunflower's head, heavy
with its clock- and counter-
clockwise rows,
or the small ear of the paper
nautilus shell, void now
of the animal, making a song
of its hollow.

*

Kate Gleason is the author of a full-length collection of poetry, Measuring the Dark (selected by Phillis Levin as the winner of the First Book Award at Zone 3 Press), and two previous chapbooks of poetry. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Verse Daily, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Green Mountains Review, Crab Orchard Review, Cimarron Review, Rattle, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Sonora Review, and elsewhere. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she has received writing fellowships from the NEA (in conjunction with the Ragdale Foundation artist colony), the Vermont Studio Center, and the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. Formerly the editor of Peregrine literary magazine and a poet in the schools, she currently leads writing workshops and runs Writers Submit, a literary submitting and editing service.

TO ORDER COPIES: Send check or money order for $8 made out to Anabiosis Press. Send to Anabiosis Press, 2 South New St, Bradford, MA 01835.

Albatross Guidelines | Albatross Backissues | Chapbook Contest Guidelines | Past Chapbook Winners | The Squares