by Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor

It fell, plop! to the floor, a thirsty palmetto bug in August, trying to stay alive. Once I would’ve screamed, but I was by myself and there was no one else to save me. I had a blue cloth napkin that I’d used many times to wipe my lips. I cupped fabric around the slow dying body then squeezed until crack! I did what any desperate grown-up would do: I carried it to the edge of my property without making sure it was dead. Behind the oven, beneath porch board floors, inside shower drains, it’s still there, making babies.

Continue with “Grief Part III“

Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor, University of Georgia Meigs Professor of Education, is the author of The Creative Ethnographer’s Notebook, Imperfect Tense (poems) and five other books on the arts of language and education. Recipient of numerous NEA Big Read Grants, a NEA Distinguished Fellowship, Hambidge Residency Award, and the Beckman award, her poems, translations, and creative nonfiction have appeared in Georgia Review, Bitter Southerner, Lilith, Poet Lore, Rattle, American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Hadassah, Plume and elsewhere.