Vespers

Mary Morris

When she left her body
she disappeared to a lake
the color of glaciers,
slipped through the lip of water,
swam inside a tabernacle.All that was chronic disappeared:
desire, cancer, ache, hunger.
I searched the globes of her fixed pupils
and thought: witness, birth of a child,
death of a mother, closed her eyelids,
stepped away from the breeze.

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Mary Morris has published or has forthcoming poems in Poetry, Boulevard, and Prairie Schooner. Her forthcoming book, Enter Water, Swimmer, will be published by Texas Review Press. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her website is https://www.water400.org

The Massachusetts Review

Spring 2018

Amherst, Massachusetts

University of Massachusetts

Executive Editor
Jim Hicks

Poetry Editors
Franny Choi
Nathan McClain

Poetry-in-Translation Editor
Maria José Giménez

Founded in 1959 by a group of professors from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst College, Mount Holyoke, and Smith, The Massachusetts Review is one of the nation’s leading literary magazines, distinctive in joining the highest level of artistic concern with pressing public issues. As The New York Times observed, “It is amazing that so much significant writing on race and culture appears in one magazine.” MR was named one of the top ten literary journals in 2008 by the Boston Globe.

A 200-page quarterly of fiction, poetry, essays, and the visual arts by both emerging talents and established authors, including Pulitzer and Nobel prizewinners, special issues have covered women’s rights, civil rights, and Caribbean, Canadian, and Latin American literatures.

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