An Awakening
Claudia Gary

I find her name scrawled lightly under “Maid”

in Mom’s phone book from when we lived in Dallas

mid-century. Ever since then she’s stayed

safe in the basement of my memory palace,

where warm southern air yields to the perfume

of ironing fresh linen tablecloths,

silk shirts and handkerchiefs, making them bloom

unscorched, protecting them from hungry moths.

She showed me how to smooth a cotton collar

with the hot iron’s point, asking what I’d

studied that day, claiming I was a scholar,

since all except First Grade she’d been denied.

I frowned, confused, and asked how that could be.

Gracious despite such wrongs, she smiled at me.

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Claudia’s notes: “This sonnet is in my new book, Time and Other Solvents, which is a story of healing told in poems. The poem refers to the U.S. south in the middle of the 20th century, shortly before the Civil Rights movement was widely known.”

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Claudia Gary teaches workshops on Sonnets, Villanelles, Natural Meter, Persona Poems, Poetry vs. Trauma, etc., at The Writer’s Center (writer.org) and privately, currently via Zoom. The author of Time and Other Solvents (Sligo Creek Publishing, 2026), Humor Me (2006), and several chapbooks, most recently Genetic Revisionism, she is an advisory editor for New Verse Review, as well as a health and science writer, visual artist, and composer of tonal art songs and chamber music. A semifinalist for the Anthony Hecht Prize (Waywiser), Pushcart Prize nominee, Honorable Mentionee in the Able Muse book contest, and three-time finalist in the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Contest, Claudia has chaired panels on Poetry and Music, Poetry and Science, and The Sonnet in 2016, at the West Chester University (Pa.) poetry conference; and on Poetry and Music at the Frost Farm poetry conference. Her 2022 article on setting poems to music is online at https://straightlabyrinth.info/conference.html. See pw.org/content/claudia_gary.

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An Awakening Claudia Gary

An Awakening
Claudia Gary