Mourning Window
for Angela
The morning I closed your eyes
I sat looking at your high school portrait
on the living room bureau until
pink and orange sun motes
floated above the thin gold frame,
and until I couldn’t see you anymore.
The only sound is the light clink
of my breakfast spoon
as it dips in and out
of the jade bowl.
Daily I enter, this photo:
We’re in Seal Beach.
You on a corner bench.
A black hairband holds back
your springy hair twists.
You, wearing your favorite brother’s
tan jacket.
You, smiling.
I feel loved through your dark glasses.
Dr. Abod is an award-winning director of four documentary films, The Passionate Pursuits of Angela Bowen, The Edge of Each Other’s Battles: The Vision of Audre Lorde. Nice Chinese Girls Don’t: A poetry memoir with Kitty Tsui and Look Us in the Eye: The Old Women’s Project. She is a former assistant professor of Communications and Women’s Studies. Her current passions include being a jazz singer and writing poetry. Her poems have been published in: One Art Journal, The Metro Washington Weekly, Silver Birch Press, Wild Crone Wisdom, Artemis Journal, Sinister Wisdom and are forthcoming in Spillway Magazine. Abod has been passionately addressing inequality for five decades. At the height of second wave feminism, she was the singer in the New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band,
