Yvette Neisser Moreno's poems have been published in numerous publications, including Beltway Poetry Quarterly, North Carolina Literary Review, The Potomac Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. She has translated two books of poetry from Spanish: South Pole/Polo Sur by María Teresa Ogliastri (co-translated with Patricia Bejarano Fisher, forthcoming from Settlement House, 2011), and Difficult Beauty: Selected Poems by Luis Alberto Ambroggio (Cross-Cultural Communications, 2009). She teaches writing and translation at the University of Maryland University College and The Writer's Center. She was recently a finalist in the Washington Writers’ Publishing House poetry book contest.
Summer 2011
Table of Contents - Vol. VII, No. 2
Poetry Fiction Translations Reviews
Yvette Neisser Moreno
After a Funeral
In the
middle of hide-and-seek,
we found ourselves staring into the closet:
suits, starched shirts, empty shoes.
Though Uncle Lenny was gone,
his
loafers were still polished,
closet door ajar, wooden pipe
still lying on
the dresser.
Just a moment
face to
face with closet darkness,
then we were back in the game
dashing from
room to room
to look for hiding places.
Only this morning, pulling my
coat
around my shoulders, it came to me—
there was a man who once stood
in those huge, gaping shoes,
whose wrists once filled those hollow
cuffs.
Poppy, my cousins used to call him.
So he was somebody’s husband,
somebody’s brother. Somebody.
© Yvette Neisser Moreno
