Ellen Steinbaum
Losers
The silver earring’s gone, the dangly beaded one I’ve lost and found and lost and found for decades--gone for good this time, I think, the other permanently unpaired. I bought them near where we skied with the children when they still were children--grown now, moved away. Friends, too, are taking off, set upon by whispered ills, diminishments, and varying decay. One has a small apartment now, her bed behind a screen.
Ellen Steinbaum has two collections out, Afterwords, published in 2001, and Container Gardening, published in 2008. Until recently, she wrote a literary column for The Boston Globe and she now writes a blog, "Reading and Writing and the Occasional Recipe," which can be seen at her web site, www.ellensteinbaum.com. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Bellevue Literary Review, and Fulcrum, among others, and are in the current issues of the online journals Muddy River Review and Innisfree.
