PoetryMagazine.com Grace Cavalieri

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Since 1996 Volume XXI

Grace Cavalieri

Grace Cavalieri has written 16 books of poems, and 26 produced plays. Forthcoming books in 2014 are The Mandate of Heaven (Bordighera Press) and The Man Who Got Away. (Scarif Press.) She holds the 1993 & 2013 Allen Ginsberg Awards for poetry, the Pen Syndicated Fiction Award, the Bordighera Poetry Award, the Columbia Award, a CPB Silver Medal among others. She was also the 2013 recipient of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs George Garrett Award "for Outstanding Community Service in Literature.” She founded and still produces "The Poet and the Poem," recorded at the Library of Congress, for public radio, celebrating 37 years on-air..

The White Jacket

I took it to be cleaned anyway. The one I wore to Key West in February.

Just the right length over shorts, capris, or skirts.

I sit now in a white wicker chair .

Outside with white wine.

Under the Dogwood tree.

When I was small I thought only rich people had such trees.

Further down, the green cathedral that disappears my birds.

Maybe I can think about the white cribs instead.

With their soft talcum smells.

Or the gown I wore with 100 pearl buttons down the back.

Crystal Pensacola where wiggly babies were held in low tide.

While higher on dunes Ken cooked eggs on a Coleman stove.

But that is the clock of snow that stopped.

Now. Here. This is better they say. This white paper. The Dogwood almost gone.