For My Father
Hair rising from your head
like white flames
you are dying.
Is this the flower
flung into air
too delicate to breathe?
Show me something lovely
in these muscles
shrouding bone.
Say this is a lily
unfurling,
say this an explosion of rose,
tell me that the gown
about your body
will lift
and you, radiant,
ascend slowly
into memory.
***
BIOGRAPHY
Weather Report, Laura Freedgood’s second chapbook, is a journey through solitude, loss, and death to an embrace of what remains.
Laura’s poems have appeared in New Jersey Journal of Poets, The Chrysalis Reader, Heliotrope, Descant, Hawai’I Pacific Review, Riversedge, Wisconsin Review, Euphony, Crucible, and in other print journals. She was the featured poet for the 10th anniversary edition of The Aurorean, a journal that publishes her poems often. Her work has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize, and she was awarded a three-year poetry grant from the City University of New York, from 2003-2006.
A graduate of Vassar College, Laura has Master’s degrees in English from Indiana University and The Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from Boston University. She has been a lecturer in English at Boston University and at Bradford College in Haverhill, Massachusetts. She is currently an assistant professor at Queensborough Community College in Bayside, New York, teaching writing to ESL students.
Born and raised in New York City, Laura lived in the Boston area for 25 years, and now resides in Montclair, New Jersey. Her mother, the late Lillian Freedgood, an artist, and her father, the late John Godey, best known for his novel The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three, inspired many of the poems in this collection.
Contact info:
Laura Freedgood
55 North Mountain Avenue, Apt. A5
Montclair, NJ 07042
973-233-0488
laura81@verizon.net
