Chocolate Waters
My Mother's Wedding Rings
Why did you continue to wear them
20 years after Dad was gone?
They embraced you in death
like he never did in life.
A reminder you could put up with a man,
an unloving man, but a man just the same?
As a teenager I found his silver-plated lighter,
"Carol" scratched into it.
She was one of many.
At 58 you confessed you hadn't been intimate
for 16 years.
It was the most personal thing
you ever revealed.
I didn't know why you told me then.
I don't know now.
Bio
"The Poet Laureate of Hell's Kitchen," Chocolate Waters began writing poems when she was eight. That was the same age she burned down a barn smoking. She has received many grants and fellowships, produced four books and been published in hundreds of print and on-line journals. The Greatest Hits of Chocolate Waters, a "Sapphic Classic" chosen by Sinister Wisdom (the longest-running dyke magazine in the U.S.) will appear sometime in 2022. Her latest collection, Muddying the Holy Waters, will be produced by Eggplant Press in 2020. Yes, she loves cats!