When I lost myself:
I am extinct.
No part of me goes forward.
I am ashes
Underground.
My stories silenced.
My mutating memories
dismissed.
My sorrows and joys erased:
blankness bracketing grief.
When I First Returned
My death still bled
into a suppurating
numbness,
and terror.
It didn’t feel like a choice:
study the wound
or disappear.
I agreed to look.
Now
I stand beside the river
I came from and will return to;
I look into it,
still learning to swim.
Learning Living 
Joan, I love your poetry. It always makes me think and go back to re-read and absorb yet another layer. And as often as not, I find myself looking up a word you have used with which I’m not familiar, or have heard it so seldom, it bears further scrutiny.
Are those children’s clothes hanging on the line? They evoke for me a remembrance of a trunk I have filled with Granny’s things…”lawn” dresses, high button shoes, clothes for my granny’s dolly….all done in linen.
Your poetry is like a long thirst-quenching drink on a wickedly hot summer’s day.
thank you. katie
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