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Featured Collaboration|Poetry: All forms & styles/Visual Arts
Patricia Cannon/Autumn Foote
Ohio Night
Click on the title to explore or download the free PDF in the 2023 Buttonhook Press Broadside Series.
After the waitress left with
our orders my mother looked up
from her cup of coffee and said,
“I remember when I was a waitress
and hurried to get off work
to see my boyfriend, Bill.
We’d meet at the lake and laugh and laugh…me wearing a life jacket because I didn’t know how to swim!”
And at this unexpected offering
of jarred light
a woman I hadn’t known
appeared in my mind
wet and wrapped
in reddish-orange,
swirling and swirling
in black water
like a firefly bright
in the Ohio night
stripping the sting of age
for a peculiar moment
from her hazel eyes
honey-like
under the diner’s dim light.
About the writer:
Patricia Cannon has been a Registered Nurse at UCSF since 2001. She has worked in cardiac critical care, neurointensive care, hemeoncology, school nursing, and currently, in research. Her passion is her faith, photography, and the written word in all its forms.
Image: Ohio Night by Autumn Foote (contemporary). No medium specified. No size specified. By 2022. By permission. Autumn Foote is a self-taught artist. She does work as an IHSS worker and for a selected few friends. She loves reading and art, and she has a goal to put her faith first in her life. The first version of Ohio Night appeared in Fish Dance (a poetry newsletter that is now out-of-print).
OJAL Art Incorporated, publishing since 2017 as OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters (O:JA&L) and its imprint Buttonhook Press, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation supporting writers and artists worldwide.
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