Stephen Gibson
For a Girl Who Died in the 1918 Influenza Pandemic
To get to Calvary from the Bronx, I’d take the el
to Manhattan, then the Queens line to the cemetery
where I cut grass in the oldest section every day
where there were photographs in headstones, ovals
like ostrich eggs with pictures, with this one pretty
girl I still remember, hands folded like Catholics pray,
in a white veil and dress—some family’s daughter—
Italian, I’m guessing (that section was all from Italy),
her hands tied together with a white rosary; anyway,
in high school, I remember thinking the 1918 influenza
pandemic that killed her seemed as ancient as Pompeii.
Stephen Gibson is the author of Self-Portrait in a Door-Length Mirror (University of Arkansas Press, 2017) winner of the Miller Williams Prize. His previous collections include The Garden of Earthly Delights Book of Ghazals (Texas Review Press, 2016); Rorschach Art Too (Story Line Press, 2014), winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Prize sponsored by the Iris N. Spencer Poetry Awards of the West Chester University Poetry Center; Paradise (University of Arkansas Press, 2011), a finalist for the Miller Williams prize; Frescoes (Lost Horse Press, 2011); Masaccio’s Expulsion (MARGIE/IntuiT House, 2008), selected and introduced by Andrew Hudgins; and Rorschach Art (Red Hen Press, 2001). His poems have appeared in Agni, Barrow Street, Bellevue Literary Review, The Paris Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, The Sewanee Review, and The Yale Review, and other publications. He lives in West Palm Beach, Florida.
SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.
If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.