Iowa
I hope I never forget The apartment in Des Moines. The downstairs people And their motorcycle wedding. Our art show upstairs And Rick, too tall For the doorways Petting my cat Chanting her name.
All work and no play Made us drink and do drugs. Evening mushrooms In the harvested fields Opera in the soybeans. Every apple on the tree Shining like a moon.
Suzanne Feldman received her Masters in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of five novels, including Absalom’s Daughters (Holt, 2016, starred review in Kirkus) She was a Walter Dakin Fellow at the Sewanee Writers Conference in 2019. Her latest novel, Sisters of the Great War, (Mira/HarperCollins, 2021) has been nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. In 2022 she was awarded her third grant from the Maryland State Arts Council and won The Washington Writers’ Publishing House Fiction Prize for her short story collection, The Witch Bottle. She has had two Pushcart nominations for short fiction.