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Emily Strauss
USA  American Emily Strauss has an M.A. in English, but is self-taught in poetry, which she has written since college. She has been actively publishing since 1997 and over 250 of her poems appear in over a hundred online venues and in anthologies, in the U.S. and abroad. Recently these have included The Four Seasons (Kind of a Hurricane Press), The Writing Disorder, Strong Verse, Aji Magazine, Balloons Lit Journal (Hong Kong), and The Screech Owl: The Apple Tree (UK). The natural world is generally her framework; she also considers the stories of people and places around her and personal histories. She is a semi-retired teacher, now 64 years old, living in California.
Deconstructing a House They invaded the house afterwards— sister, brother, children, two great grandchildren they opened drawers and cupboards and photo albums, looking for the text of her life, neatly numbered journals later scattered across the floor interesting reading if only they could decipher old German.
They pushed all the furniture around left the houseplants outside to freeze removed the center table, fingered the pictures, searching for meaning to reconcile death with her belongings.
They baked all the last cake mixes threw out the thirty-year-old Pinot Noir spawned bags of garbage, speculated on unlabeled dried powders and foreign-language foods, wondered about the stability of rice left dusty with age and dead paper moths.
Finally her presence was nearly unrecognizable amidst the altered landscape of children screaming, cigarette butts, wine, pillows displaced, her clothes inspected bedsheets mis-folded, fresh coffee, flowers from the church.
Was her being within this dwelling now undermined by those who defined their mission according to who takes that untitled painting who holds the crumbling sheet music who can explain the Dutch inscriptions?
The dog will get another home extra yarn will become new scarves thread-worn towels will be discarded collected soap fragments can melt away this house closed and abandoned— she wouldn't accept the mess, would begin again to reconstruct the known world.
© Copyright, 2015, Emily
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