The Diary of Saint Marion by Gloria Monaghan

Praise for The Diary of Saint Marion

Gloria Monaghan’s poems, with their essentially straightforward, eminently readable language, also explode with surprises—a sly wit, a sprinkling of deliciously unusual verbiage (“oaknut,” “cupule,” “plumule”—all in the same poem!), and a wealth of startlingly touching details (the book opens with a little hand-grenade of a poem about a tiny opera bag that “Couldn’t have held much more/than a few coins for tipping a bathroom attendant/or purchasing milk.”. This whole book bursts with a rare freshness to be applauded and savored.

—Lloyd Schwartz, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and author of Who’s on First? New and Selected Poems

I Am Not Afraid of Storms

I am not afraid of storms
or the wind or moving fragment against
sky in mid-winter, or early December
wandering sky
of blown leaves against the new wet snow
or your face, the one I imagined as we all imagine.
The one face that will save me.

He gets up and moves towards me,
and I put down the book
I was pretending to read.
(Dickens, Middlemarch, Bronte or was it Ford Maddox Ford)
From the café car, the two of us make our ways to passenger seats.
I have my kewpie doll my cousin gave me for luck,
and we will do nothing but talk into the night
all the way to Syracuse. We will not even kiss.
It is exactly like the stars against the night sky.

Better this way, so when he gets off at Syracuse,
I don’t have to say goodbye.
He didn’t really want me with all his heart.
The leaves stick to the new snow and ice
and yes, even died.

I am not afraid of storms because I like them.
I feel safe indoors, but I do worry over the tulip tree
if it will split open and crash into the house.
I hugged the tulip tree
as if it could divide me, and I would be a fig again
with meticulous seeds and divine divides,
stickiness inherent in my veins
like the callow lies of my grandfather,
his pig skinned key holder of two centuries skeletal to Sargent,
sailor to hawking product for Ford.
What became of him, green-eyed boy?
Oh captain, mon Lieutenant captain?

I am not afraid of storms, but I do wonder
how I will die.
    Sister Ida said; what is the cat thinking?
I said I don’t know, but he doesn’t stay sad for long
and this is true. I know nothing of the mouse.

About the Author

Gloria Monaghan is a Professor at Wentworth University in Boston at the School of Science and Humanities. This is her seventh poetry collection. Others include, Cormorant on the Strand (Lily Poetry Review, 2023), Hydrangea (Kelsay Books, 2020) False Spring (Adelaide Books, 2019) , Torero (Nixes Mate, 2019), and The Garden (Flutter Press, 2) and Flawed (Finishing Line Press, 2011). Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart, Griffin and Mass Center for The Book Prizes. Her film, Daughter of Rubens, was selected by the 25th annual Provincetown Film Festival