Marilyn Baszczynski

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Update: self-portrait

All around me the past crouches in boxes,
suffocates my desk, hangs in closets.
Time grows white and silent like snow
poised to spill from stiffened limbs
while trees, birds, horses hold their breath
and wait for a brushstroke to lighten them.
It seems I do nothing.

I have spent my whole life learning to live,
now I know I'll soon have to learn how to die.
No one brings back years that keep
blowing away. So let me inhale everything,
inhale silence and light, until I can
float like a shimmer of snow
thrown up into the wind.

Marilyn Baszczynski, originally from Ontario, Canada, lives and writes in rural Iowa. Her book, Gyuri. A Poem of wartime Hungary, was published in 2015. Her poetry has appeared in several journals and anthologies including Abaton, Aurorean, enskyment (spring 2020), KYSO Flash, Loch Raven Review, Lyrical Iowa, Midwest Poetry Review, Mused, Slippery Elm, Sunbeams, Telepoem Booth Iowa (spring 2020), Tipton Poetry Journal, and Whistling Shade. Formerly President of the Iowa Poetry Association, Marilyn currently edits IPA's annual anthology, Lyrical Iowa. Read more about her at www.marilynbaszczynski.com.