- Portrait of Her Father as Meteor
sometimes he is the smallest of his kind, a speck of dustsometimes a rough stone effigy she walks around to reach the stereo he tamps down tobacco with a small silver toolthreads a wooly caterpillar through his pipe it emerges smeared with black tar the night sky is polluted with lightsmells of smoke and cherries at night, a body of matter a matter of body a broken-off particle sometimes he is heading straight toward hershe is the crater he leaves behind [End Page 300]
Pam Crow lives in Portland, Oregon, where she works as a clinical social worker. She won the Astraea Emerging Lesbian Poets prize in 1998, and published her first book of poems, Inside This House, in 2007. Her poems have appeared in Southern Poetry Review, CALYX, Seattle Review, Ploughshares, and others. Last year she won the Neil Shepard Prize in Poetry from Green Mountains Review. She can be reached at pamcrowlcsw@gmail.com.