issue 6
// poetry
Carrying Touchstones
by Adele Evershed
On the train to Norwalk, I read the first two Touchstone-winning haibun—they’re both about dead mothers that linger long after the worm moon has waned. There’s a body tucked between the pages of a not-very-good book and ashes in an envelope that sassily answers back. And I’m disappointed. Don’t get me wrong—I’ve written reams about my own dead mother—seeing her in the steam from my kettle—hearing her in the soft mutations of the sea—so I’m no stranger to this touchstone.
The other winning poems are both about children—one who is not here yet,
and one who is too much here—a hinted disability and a father who catches crabs—
maybe for a living or maybe to feel there is still a living to be had. It’s difficult to say which. I have four children of my own, each with their own claws and sideways glances—so I know all about crabs and the way they pinch.
Four poems by four different people, yet all with the same sorrow of too many words
and no understanding. And on this beautiful spring day, I don’t want to think about the grief we share—all the should haves, could haves, or never haves. No, I want to look out of the train window at the cherry blossoms and forget they will ever have to fall.
Just as I write that last word, I get an alert on my phone—an active shooter at Florida State University—and the blossoms disappear from view
train tunnel my smile on and off…
about the author // Adele Evershed
| Adele Evershed is a Welsh writer who swapped the Valleys for the American East Coast. Her work has appeared in Poetry Wales, Comstock Review, Modern Haiku, Avalon Literary Review, Black Bough Poetry and Flashflood. She is the author of Turbulence in Small Spaces (Finishing Line Press) and has a forthcoming poetry collection, In the Belly of the Wail, with Querencia Press. She has published three novellas-in-flash— Wannabe and Schooled (Alien Buddha Press), and A History of Hand Thrown Walls (Unsolicited Press). |
Instagram: @ad_libby
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