WITHOUT

I’m lying in the back seat

   without a man

      to kiss

Just listening

to robins, some sparrows,

    a cardinal chipping an evening sermon.

The garden of lake

   breathes in the fading day – as blue

      as unwrapped iris.

I am here

  contemplating

     the way sunlight bleeds

through maple leaves,

and the way I left you

    because you cannot make a tree

sacred -  or know the sweetness

    of tapped sugar.

 

 

About Joy Gaines-Friedler:

For over twenty years Joy Gaines-Friedler earned her living as a photographer in the Detroit area. For her, the distance between camera lens and page is slim. Her poetry is widely published and has won numerous awards including First Place in the 2006 Litchfield Review contest for a series of poems based on the journal of her friend Jim who died from AIDS.  Additionally, her work has been published in The Driftwood Review, Margie, The Pebble Lake Review, RATTLE, The New York Quarterly, and other literary journals. Joy teaches poetry for InsideOut Literary Arts Project which puts poets into Detroit Public Schools and for Springfed Arts that provides creative writing workshops for adults. She also works with young adults "at risk" at The Common Ground Sanctuary for Families in Crisis. Her first book of poetry Like Vapor was published by Mayapple Press, 2008.