Dressed in mismatched plaids, she’d walk into class, her face pale,
eyes a bit too far apart, yet there was something behind those eyes
that glittered like snow when sun skidded across at just the right angle.

She practiced piano while her father watched the news, yelling at her,
Stop the racket! Yet she won a scholarship,
married a tall man and moved away. Years later I heard she died.

So what’s she now doing, floating in my mind in the middle of night,
smiling at me in a room full of people, her face glowing, eyes
full of mischief—and what has she done to her hair?

Brilliant streaks of candy-apple red, cobalt blue wind their way through.

Why do the dead glow with fluorescence while I fade day by day
like a blue shirt left out in the sun.
They’ve increased in number, each as shining as when they were alive,
so tantalizingly close yet unreachable. They jostle for my attention.

Is that an angel I see, or just a refraction of light after a rain?

I am in a nest of flames with no water to quench the fire, left to twist
and turn with each day’s news.

BARBARA SOUTHARD served as Poet Laureate of Suffolk County, New York from 2019-2021. She is continuing to work with the Long Island Poetry Collective to provide Zoom workshops for poets nationally and internationally.