In this week’s poem, Lynne Benoit’s “Postcards,” we hear poignant memory-glints of a relationship. I love the leaps of this poem’s images and forward movement, and its final symbol, told wonderfully slant, of how much can lie beneath our surfaces.

Benoit has enjoyed writing since childhood. Her published work includes “Education and the Rural Middle Class: Limington Academy, 1848-1860,” which received the James Phinney Baxter Award from the journal Maine History in 1999, and “Rich With Children: the Birth of An Italian Family in America” (2006), co-authored with J. Dennis Robinson. She lives in Wells.

Postcards
By Lynne Benoit

My lover died. Facebook declared it. His face looked much thinner than when I knew him. Even then, the cancer must have been there, furtive. Established. Sex distracted us. Hand on my waist he danced me through a quiet corner of LL Bean. Postcards sent to my work address.
One by one, pencil-sketch segments. Notes of whimsy arranged to reveal an ice cream cone, softening. I melt with you. Cloaked actions played too many sharps and flats. My discarded pregnancy test. His parked car in view of my house. I want to spend the rest of my life with you, he said. It was winter, the sun off the snow squinted my eyes, making tears. A week of silence, maybe two. We were deadly. I threw the postcards into the trash. For the first time I noticed the tiny shoebox that held them. My son had stomped both feet to make the LED’s dance their cherry red jig, his fine hair tossing. He wore his new sneakers out of the store, their buried circuitry encased in plastic resin. So many things are hidden.

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Postcards,” © 2021 by Lynne Benoit, appears by permission of the author.

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