Joan Logghe

from "The Rice Sonnets"


You gave me a love bite the week
I turned fifty, and I became like
all other women. The woman at Thrift-
way Gas. The woman who works
at Walgreen's whose mother works at
Walgreen's also. The women named for stars
and those named for hope. Women who love God
and worship inside and outside churches.

Those women who stand outside the house
and weep, and those whose body has failed
them and those who have failed their bodies.
All of these, bitten by love, as I
have been unbeknownst to me on the week
I turned fifty.


Copyright © 1998 Joan Logghe.