A poem from my new book: Bonfire

Reading from The Volume of Our Incongruity at Loganberry Books in Shaker Heights, Ohio.
This poem was chosen for National Poetry Month for the Cuyahoga County Public Library poem of the day forthcoming this April.  It's about my grown-up children:

Bonfire

I see them together:

the connective tissues, the shared blood,

a counterpoint in firelight—and 

something primal and holy in me turns.

Orange-yellow waves move over their glossy faces

and rotate like pinwheels in their eyes.

Her perfect tight-teeth smile and luminous hair.

His shoulders wide and strong, his great-grandfather’s silhouette.

White sparks sprinkle upward between us.

My diaphragm expands and my ribs crack in this invisible triangle.

I am stretched like early-morning yoga,

depth perception altered in this stasis.

Leaves flutter in the heat, tree frogs sing, dogs chase

each other in and out of deep shadows. His voice,

her laughter brings stillness to my maternal island

and resurrection to what time cannot take from my soul.

by Diane Vogel Ferri

from The Volume of Our Incongruity

Finishing Line Press  2018

My New Chapbook from Finishing Line Press

The Volume of our Incongruity by Diane Vogel Ferri

$14.99

A certain irresistible sincerity marks these poems. They invite us into sacred space, where grace and unapologetic longing reside and rule, where the singular voice we hear is so quiet and prayerful we must lean in to listen. The Volume of our Incongruity, however, is more than a collection of poems. It’s a narrative, the story of a granddaughter, now recollected as one of eight “graphite markings on [a] basement two-by-four;” a wife, whose “love is a tundra, vast and white;” a mother, a “thirsty woman drinking every last drop of the sea.”   In language that is clear and deceptively simple, Diane Vogel Ferri  reaches into a life lived deeply and pulls out truth.

–Lou Suarez, author of Ask and Traveler

In The Volume of Our Incongruity, Diane Vogel Ferri chronicles life-shaping moments by alternately slowing down the kind of speeding landscapes seen from a station wagon window, and zooming in to examine life’s discrepancies up close and in person. These are poems for our times, stirring a compelling swirl where the past intersects with the present, where hope for the future can spring from a single sonogram.
 –Gail Bellamy, author, poet and Cleveland Heights poet laureate, 2009 and 2010

These intimate, powerful poems about family, love, and memory settle on your skin and won’t wash off. Diane Vogel Ferri ‘s voice is every woman’s, grappling with being a wife, mother and individual. In this vividly rendered collection, the specific details of a life become something wondrous.
–Lee Chilcote, author of The Shape of Home