Art: Photography by Marie Dashkova
While Driving
In a flash that comes to you
on this very gray day
as you drive
to pick up your daughter, whom
you love more than anything
on this earth,
you sense in your marrow
with a thud
—that any moment,
you could lose those you love,
those who give your life
meaning,
leaving you changed and deeply lost
on a wide empty road
stretching ahead to nowhere
you’d want
to go.
As you drive to pick up your daughter,
you sense with
every pore
a loneliness so palpable
it is a passenger
in your car, the road suddenly
a pathway to all grief,
real and possible, for it is
never imagined. Suddenly, you are
holding hands with it, not
fearing the ghost,
of loss lurking
behind every hug, smile,
and need
—looking it straight in the eye.
Could you still be warm? You think so,
though it would be different,
a cooler warmth.
Your belly is achingly full
of love and loss,
love’s present
and future
as you turn into the hive of
after-school and greet
your daughter.
About the author:
Jenny Coates lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, a pianist and 18 year old daughter. By day she is an international tax lawyer, by night, a poet. Her work has been selected for annual juried pairings of poems with local artists and for display on local storefronts. Her poems have also been included in a number of anthologies and collections including Meanderings and People Time published by Diversion Press, Just a Little More Time and Grief Dialogues, the Book, published by the Grief Dialogues Project and Cascade: the Washington Poets Association Journal, Vol. II. Several of Jenny's poems have appeared in Page & Spine, an online poetry magazines and several more are slated to be published by the Amethyst Review, an only literary magazine based in the UK in April, May and September 2019.
Art: Photography by Marie Dashkova
In the artist's words:
My name is Marie Dashkova; I am 25, and I was born in Moscow, Russia. I currently live here. I started to be interested in photography at the age of 12 when I was studying photo-shop to create avatars and images for sites, so I decided to make selfies using old Sony video-camera that had photo options. I was inspired a lot; it became my hobby; now I could use not only images from the internet and photos by different artists, but I could also create something by myself.
Here you can find me:
