Thomas Festa
Monarch Migration
In that family, instead of gifts, they give each other memories. Handwritten on scraps of paper, these mementos recollect the most banal anecdotes in loving detail, no quirk of childhood behavior too obscure for revisiting, no mishap on a family camping trip too commonplace to escape notice. Into a velvet jewelry box these shards of remembrance are placed; and the recipient, without fail, will pore over them, time and again reliving or, after the onset of Alzheimer’s, living the reminiscence for the first time.
milkweed seedpod a burst vessel leaking light
About the Author
Thomas Festa is a professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz, and the author of a chapbook of poems, Earthen (Finishing Line Press). Other work includes an ecopoetic reading of W.S. Merwin’s late poetry (in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment) and poems in Bennington Review, Drifting Sands Haibun, and Haiku Journal.