I wrote this poem years ago, and it’s published in the last issue of Fireside that my dear Julia Rios edited.
This was also the last issue I narrated, and so you have MOI reading it to VOUS, should you desire such things.
I wrote it for my good and darling friend Stephanie Shaw specifically, and for my dark-eyed women generally.
Please click through to enjoy For Mrs. Q. It’s best read aloud. Perhaps with a glass of red wine, or an interesting beet juice mocktail with Worcestershire in it.
…I was going to work and saw a cardinal, bold in the last browns of winter — a cardinal, I thought, how red, how right, I will write and tell her that I thought of her, that I saw something dashing in the deadness and it reminded me of her, how her mouth leaves a lasting impression, like Nabokov, like a bright scar on the brain, how I always think of her in a red coat, with a red mouth, wearing turquoise Italian heels, carrying a yellow ukulele…
C.S.E. Cooney 