Poem of the Week | March 23, 2015

This week we offer a new poem by Amber Galeo. Galeo is a writer and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. She received an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University, where she received the Ruth Bennett Prize in Poetry and a Phillip Guston fellowship. She also holds an MA in Human Rights from Columbia University, and has worked in development for The Academy of American Poets, The LGBT Community Center, Women’s League for Peace and Freedom, and The Audre Lorde Project. She is currently an editor at sherights.com and more of her work can be found at ambergaleo.com.
 
Author’s note:

This poem is a “dark one in a minor key,” my musical Dad might say. Nothing escapes the jet-black subjective experience of losing someone dear to us, and this poem explores the dubiety of life in the face of death.
 
Claire Clairmont, stepsister to Mary Shelley and Lord Byron’s lover, once called poets “creators and destroyers that preside over the images of birth and death” and I think that polarity is explicit here. What to say of verve when death sleeps right beside it? How does anything grow while everything decays below? Why is this coffin burgundy, and why all the comically gratuitous polish before it lowers into an earth assembled with dirt?
 
In my life, I’ve held onto physical details in the face of pain. ‘Gloria’ is the weathering of those details, and a tribute to a riddle of a woman.