JOANNE COREY

Poetry Fans, What a pleasure to shine the spotlight on a local poet who I have recently become acquainted with...Joanne Corey! I hope you'll enjoy her touching poems, "Over Eighty Years," first published in the Spring 2021 anthology of the Binghamton Poetry Project and later in Hearts (Kelsay Books, 2023), as well as "The Bridge," first published in POETiCA REViEW 20th Anniversary Edition. Thank you, Joanne, for sharing your words with SHINE!

Over Eighty Years
(for my mother)

The white bells’ scent rings heavy
like when my child-self sat in the lily patch
submerged in late-afternoon valley darkness

like your last May birthday
when we brought you a nosegay
of those same flowers, a few pips

dug from the hemlock humus that begat
more and more with wild
abandon to comfort

you
in your last
May-days.

The Bridge
(based on “The Water Lily Pond” by Claude Monet )

A poster of “The Water Lily Pond” has hung
above our bed for years with text

“The Metropolitan Museum of Art Exhibition - 1978”
when we were both teenagers

unable to travel to New York City,
though we could recall our younger

selves viewing other Monets on school trips
to The Clark in posh Williamstown, the colors more

alive on canvas than on poster paper
under taut plastic. Over forty years, that willow

has wept with us, that empty bridge offered a way
across, despite everything, those flowers still afloat.

Joanne Corey re-discovered her childhood love of writing poetry in her fifties. A rural New England native and graduate of Smith College, she lives in Vestal NY, where she participates with the Binghamton Poetry Project, Broome County and Tioga Arts Councils, and Grapevine Poets. With the Boiler House Poets Collective, she has completed an (almost) annual residency week at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams since 2015. She is the author of a poetry chapbook, Hearts (Kelsay Books, 2023). Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies and in several online series with Silver Birch Press and The Ekphrastic Review Writing Challenges. She was featured poet in the December 2022 edition of Portrait of New England. She invites you to visit her author site joannecorey.com for links to her work and to read her eclectic blog, Top of JC’s Mind, which recently celebrated its tenth anniversary.

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