Today's poem is "Posthumous." It was written by Jean Nordhaus. You should read it here. Really, why wouldn't you? having come this far.I first heard this poem listening to Garrison Keillor's "The Writer's Almanac" podcast, and it stuck with me ever since.
My grandmother's junk mail still routinely arrives at our door step. When it started I wondered how the senders didn't know that she was dead, and considered what her son felt as I watched him intercept telegrams to the dead.
Aside from the small gems of description found throughout (letters become "cold flakes drifting/through the mail slot," and "the last tremblings of your voice/have drained from my telephone wire."), it performs well that creative magic, where cotidian threads are woven into something extra-ordinary.
Nordhaus is a member of the Washington Writers' Publishing House, a non-profit press in the Washington-Baltimore areas. She has published four books, including Innocence, which, oddly enough, you can read here.
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