Connemara Wadsworth
Connemara Wadsworth's chapbook, The Possibility of Scorpions, about the years her family lived in Iraq in the early 50’s, won the White Eagle Coffee Store Press 2009 Chapbook Contest. Her poems are forthcoming or appeared in Prairie Schooner, Solstice, Chautauqua, Bellevue Literary Review, and Valparaiso. Her poem, “Mediation on a Photo” was a winner of The Griffin Museum of Photography’s Once Upon a Time: Photos That Inspire Tall Tales. Connemara and her husband live in Newton, Massachusetts.
What Solace
The gerbils he brought home from the school fairone parent annoyed, the other perplexedhe was beyond the age to want soft creatures to care for.When in the night the redundant spinning the treadmillkept him awake, he moved their cage to the hallway.In the morning his horror at finding one dead, the otherwounded, soon lifeless. Through his sobs said he’d beenpromised one was male, the other female.We stumble on our preferred myths of harmony,the near promise of a life lived whole dashed by adultshits a child deeply, as betrayal. And what ready wordsof solace could I offer my son who’d imagined the pairwould mate for life unlike his parents’ their marriagedissolving, their ghost-white silence.
