A transplanted Bostonian, Susan Rich is the winner of the PEN USA Poetry Award as well as the Peace Corps Writers Poetry Award for The Cartographer’s Tongue: Poems of the World, (White Pine Press, 2000). Her new book, Cures Include Travel is just out from White Pine Press (2006).
Picture a woman at work in a flag factory
remnants of red, green, and black fabric
unfurl as islands, torn heartlands at her feet.
Picture a Palestinian woman: stitching up the palm
The bus driver stops to pick plums
from an abandoned late summer garden,
the pale blue carrier bags pulled from his bed
where he sleeps underneath the bus.
All night we watch movies,
drink beer in the dark, cross borders