Ellen Devlin

The Reunion Committee Asks

The Reunion Committee Asks 

what I’ve Done. Got a job. Got married. Saved quarters for the laundromat. Tried every church
and left every church I tried. Yonkers was

a daughter, a son. A still born I never got over. I hooked a rug. Started wearing heels & CVS
cosmetics again. Read all of Agatha Christie.

And most of Webster’s Third. Fell in love with & fell in love with. To stop hiding from precision,
painted botanicals but got

eroticized painting this leaf this green. Irvington was a grandson & two more, some civic
collusion. I am still bewildered, hungry.

I went on retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh. 
He named me Compassionate Joy of the Heart which felt heightened & a little misplaced,

especially because I kept trying to see 
Richard Gere, rumored to be at the dharma talks.

Ellen Devlin's poetry has published or is forthcoming in The Cortland Review, Ekphrasis, Lime Hawk Review, New Ohio Review, PANK, Poet Lore, Redactions: Poetry Poetics and Prose, The Lost River Review, The Sow's Ear and Women's Studies Quarterly Review and Beyond Words, (forthcoming, Feb, 2023) Rita, a chapbook, published by Cervena Barva Press ( 2019), and Heavenly Bodies at the Met forthcoming  from Cervena Barva Press (2022).