Gabriele Priska von Beroldingen - Honorable Mention

The Other Girl

We are an easy riddle:
She is my mother’s granddaughter,
But not my child.

Coming though my kitchen door
She is cream skin with red hair,
a Brueghel in a flannel shirt and dirty jeans.
I smile. I don’t have to dress her.

This visit she chooses the white cups
that were my mother’s. We laugh,
sip hot chocolate through red licorice sticks.
Someday my rings will fit her fingers.

It is not the old pictures
that attract her, but my cedar closet
and the old clothes with peculiar collars.

She fingers things, sniffs them, guesses
at the shape, texture of our missing guest.
She touches mothwork, wants to know,
will I keep these clothes forever.

I cannot answer yet.
After twenty years I am only learning now
how a daughter blooms inside an empty dress.

Gabriele Priska von Beroldingen lives in Oregon. An "on again off again" writer for most of her adult life, she decided to get more serious about it three years ago, when she began transferring ideas jotted down on scrap paper into poems kept in computer files. Initial results of this experiment made their way onto various boards and then into the Spring 1998 issue of Melic Review. Her work can also be seen in Moveo Angelus Literary Arts, where the staff, equally impressed with her writing and her willingness to work cheap, made her production editor.