Woman of Salt: poems by Beverly Voigt. Number 3 in Volume Six of our limited-edition Summer Kitchen Chapbook Series. Available this August. 

Cover image: vintage quilting cotton. Series design by Ron Mohring.

Published: August 1, 2018 [49 copies]
31 pages
$9.00   S O L D   O U T

BEVERLY VOIGT is a native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She works as an editor and desktop publisher in the South Bay area of Los Angeles. Her poetry has been published in Crab Creek Review, Friends of Acadia Journal, and elsewhere.

In the Passage

In my dreams she is the one sleeping,
in a bed in the rooms I visit, or on a porch,
down a winding hallway, on a mountainside. She
is tucked away, her back to me. I don’t try
to wake her, I just ask the ex-boyfriend,  
or the maharajah, or the sumac tree I’m dreaming of
to keep it down. It is when I begin to wake
that I hear her calling me, or her call begins
to wake me. And I am a child again, and she’s
downstairs, calling up to say it’s time
for supper, or to bring down my dirty clothes. 
Or to tell me she’s going out and when
she’ll be back. I want to respond from the top
of the stairs, See you soon, run down
and hug her, kiss her soft cheek, before
she crosses that threshold. I want to stay here, 
in this passage, this warm half-sleep, where she is,
where she still is. Or just her voice, which
I would accept as enough, as a gift from whatever
rules the unconscious, the gift of my memory
of her, coming back in the door. But the day 
is dragging me across its brink, into bright light 
and cares, into another day empty of her. These
ten years. And she is still below, calling me. 
Her voice like a bell.

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