Linda Benninghoff

IN YOUR ROOM

Listen to Audio Version read by Jill Khoury.

In your room the plaid socks
hung on the radiator's edge to dry,
your favorite brown corduroy jacket
lay sleeves open on the bed.
You carried yourself gingerly,
tall, unfazed by the congestion
of the streets, walking to your
white-haired father's,
who no longer wanted you there,
as my father no longer wanted me there,
and once when I lay on the sofa
with chest pain,
refused me any help,
as if love was a property or doing
of the young,
which we lose as we age,
as the spring keeps its gulls
with white fish in their beaks,
but loses its flowers,
flooded with magnificent
oranges and rose.

Linda Benninghoff attended Johns Hopkins University where she was an English major. She got a Masters in English with an emphasis on creative writing. While living in Baltimore, she trained to be an advocate for the disabled, and used this skill when she worked as a journalist. Her first full-length book, Whose Cries Are Not Music, has a section in it on disability.