Saturday by Margaret Ross

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend May 13, 2016   Saturday   Margaret Ross

It was, it was explained to me, a holiday to enter spring while honoring the dead and so its celebration was   a picnic in a cemetery. Flowers and fruit and fish cooked as her father liked and a kind of pastry   that had been her uncle’s nickname. Her aunt was bringing paper iPhones, purses and a little villa just for fun   to burn. I passed carts selling them as I walked up the slope behind the city hospital. A child   climbed a parked car shouting that he was a horse. I took a picture and the colors on screen looked richer, less treacherous. Downhill a stadium surrounded by white trailers. Underwear   hung from the clotheslines. I took a picture of myself but I did not appear the person that I was.   The picnic would be nearly done. She’d said they’d leave behind chrysanthemums   made of cloth to last and scented so they smelled not like chrysanthemums but like a woman.            Copyright © 2016 Margaret Ross. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “I started ‘Saturday’ while visiting a friend who was planning a trip to her family grave plot and finished it over a year later in my childhood bedroom. Something akin to the mixed intimacies and estrangements of those circumstances infused the experience that occasioned the poem, which is, to my mind, about presence and absence and how each can sometimes seem like the other.” —Margaret Ross   Margaret Ross is the author of A Timeshare (Omnidawn Publishing, 2015). She is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and lives in Berkeley, California. Poetry by Ross   A Timeshare (Omnidawn Publishing, 2015) "Ode to a Dressmaker’s Dummy" by Donald Justice "Wheeling Motel" by Franz Wright "Sequestered Writing" by Carolyn Forché Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038