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Mock Orange on Wash Day
by J. C. Todd
The washboard, drying,
ripples in sunlight
revealing nothing
of what work is over
to make it shine that way,
nothing of the morning’s wash
that wrenched her shoulder blades
where the grade school nuns
said angel wings grew
before you plunged to birth,
wings abandoned in heaven,
they claimed, with your halo.
Her only halo now is
her family’s careless grime
circling the set tub
until the clothes rise, bright
and unsmudged as a name
for a baby who’s barely here
before she’s gone.
Amy, Amy Beth.
The lift and fall of its melody
all that remain
to make the name mean,
to weight it, bow it low
as the clothesline
where shirts, shorts,
underthings she’s hung
shimmer like spirits of children,
releasing damp to noonday heat
in a haze, a halo ascending,
disappearing, unsubstantial
as the airy scent
of mock orange blossoms,
scent that disassembles
as she names it, gone
like that.
PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED:
Nightshade. Pine Press 1995, 2000.
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Bio: J. C. Todd’s poems and translations have appeared in the anthology Shade 2004,
and in American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard
Review and other journals. Pine Press published two chapbooks: Nightshade (1995) and Entering
Pisces (1985).
Awards include a fellowship in poetry from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, two awards for poetry from
the Leeway Foundation, a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts international artist exchange fellowship to
the Schloss Wiepersdorf colony in Germany, a scholarship to The Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators
in Sweden, and a stipend from the Latvian Cultural Capital Foundation. Her poems have received five Pushcart
Prize nominations.
She is an associate editor for the poetry web magazine, The Drunken Boat
(www.thedrunkenboat.com), where she
has edited special features on contemporary Lithuanian and Latvian poetry in translation, and she was guest
poetry editor for the Summer, 2005 issue of The Bucks County Review, and co-editor of “Recurrence
in Another Tongue: Poets Translating Poets” that appeared in Frigate 4 in 2003.
A lecturer in Creative Writing and in the Writing for College program at Bryn Mawr College, she has an MFA
from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
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