Poem of the Week | July 13, 2015

This week we offer a new poem by Carlinda D’Alimonte. D’Alimonte is the author of two books of poetry published by Black Moss Press – Now That We Know Who We Are (2004) and Other Living Things (2009). Her poetry has appeared in Contemporary Verse 2, The Windsor Review, and many anthologies. Carlinda D’Alimonte has taught high school English and Creative Writing for twenty-five years. Prior to her teaching high-school, she worked as both a sessional instructor and multi-media producer at the University of Windsor and a researcher and writer for CBC television. She lives in Tecumseh, Ontario.
 
Author’s note:

“In the Waiting Room” is one of the few poems I have not edited extensively. I wrote it one morning following my sister’s death when my focus settled on the idea of dust, detritus, what remains when living is over. I remembered one comment my sister had made about dust, and from those few words the entire poem emerged.
 
It struck me that dust is essentially made up of dead matter, yet it grows and moves; it follows us, almost taunts us. I’ve often felt that dust pulls me down, threatens to defeat me, or gives me a sense of helplessness, uselessness – synonymous with the idea of death, I suppose. However, I have seldom indulged that feeling for very long. Instead, I’ve fought it, cleared it away, though I’ve remained cognizant of how transitory my efforts were. All of this affected me deeply in those early morning hours when I was trying to make sense of my sister’s death and would wake in the night to write before heading to the high school where I taught at the time. My sister died of peritoneal carcinoma – a slow painful death and because we lived in the same city, I was able to spend a good deal of time with her in that last year. I spent much time thinking and writing about the experience in the very early hours of the days and weeks that followed her passing.