First Rain is the 2009 winner of the Pecan Grove Press Chapbook Contest.  Click here to order a copy. Below are sample poems from First Rain

First Rain   My arms tubed in a vinyl raincoat, it is here I learn how the skin doesn’t breathe. This morning is locked in the color of dawn   and Mother, who opens her umbrella wide as worry, shields me to the curb where schoolbus doors flex open. Once aboard, I take my place in alphabetical order.   Below, the motor erupts. I watch the road moving towards us, under us and through the window, Mother standing on the curb, shrinking slowly to a dot.

I Think Of My Mother   when youth was her best accessory, when she’s standing   on the dance floor, beautiful and alone. She is waiting there   in black and white, the way I have seen her in photographs.   Right about now, my father comes in, nervous   and white-faced as the moon. Of course, he, too, is posed,   his better side pushed forward in my mind.   Only this time, there is something I haven’t seen before;   maybe it’s the August heat that is making him sweat,   or the curve of my mother’s right hip   as she stands there, swaying in place.  He is wearing   the look of a man who’s convinced   he may never think straight again. Dumbstruck, until   the music thuds him on the back like an older brother,   when he takes that first step towards her   and I am about to begin.

Deborah Kerr and so on…   In the scene everyone knows, she falls on the beach fixed as a footprint that won’t wash away. And the others like her, Marilyn’s skirt petaling around her waist, Ingrid’s soft tears in the fog.   I remember my mother twisting red lipstick from a tube, nubbing its surface, searching for the faces it promised, and the nights she tissued rouge from her cheek as my father faded like the edge of a wave returning to sea.   Above them, the light bulb, hanging like a white fruit, inedible, unpicked. Below them, the carpet a calendar of sand, where tomorrow would be another day.