Pamela Brothers Denyes’ award-winning poems are published in many Virginia journals, Barstow & Grand V, several international collections by Wingless Dreamer and The Poet Magazine, MindFull Magazine, Vallum Poetry, Black Moon Magazine, Tangled Locks Journal and many others. Pamela’s books, The Right Mistakes and The Widow’s Lovers, were published in 2022 by Kelsay Books. She published a chapbook that year, too, As I Lay Dreaming. All are available from the publisher, the author or your favorite bookseller.

Pamela’s career-based writing has included contract nonfiction, instructional design and manuals, developmental and copy editing, and writing for her regional newspaper and internet gateway. She is also a musician and singer, and has worked professionally in that arena, too. A mother and grandmother, Pamela resides in eastern Virginia but travels all she can. You can reach her and see her work at www.pbdenyes.com.

The Ghosts Who Haunt Me

Wandering for lost years,
under some callous curse,

I could not begin
to live as myself

until I fought
to confront,

to exorcise
and dismiss

the ghosts who
haunt me.

The Whole of a Person

As I undressed for bed last night,
I wondered yet again why Mom,
beautiful and accomplished as she was,
stayed with my Dad, the oft-drunk charmer.

The thought niggled like an ear worm,
rising and rounding the corners too fast
in my worn-track brain, until at last,
I remembered a meme that caught me today.

Six circles separated into two columns.
On one side, the circles were fully colored
a dark purple, bearing labels of “I am sad,”
“I am angry,” “I am ugly,” as if to show

that people can be consumed by, judge
themselves by, even be seen by others
as being wholly filled with that one emotion,
as though everything in their personality is

only dark purple, with no spring green or
chipper pink or easy sky blue. The second
column had the same circles, but the dark purple
appeared as only a small portion of the circle.

Here the captions read “I feel sad,”
I feel angry,” and “I feel ugly,” suggesting
that any one emotion, one action or even a series
of mistakes, is not the whole circle of a person.

My answer came and I drifted off,
thinking of all the good things
Mom loved about Dad.

Final Instructions

A pair of mourning doves rest in a late-day sunbeam,
preening and cooing. Was that a kiss? He is very attentive
in April’s warming heat, but no nest-building yet.

“Why don’t you just leave us the hell alone,”
Dad growled in that gravelly cigarette-worn voice,
so I left town after making sure they had what they needed,
seemingly only each other.

Bobbing heads on a cherry tree limb, the dove pair appears
to be negotiating, perhaps ideas on nest space, a hoped-for brood,
or whatever a dove pair must decide.

Those were Dad’s last words to me. Two weeks
of me leaving him alone passed before he died
on the bathroom floor, a widow-maker heart attack
claiming him, probably before he hit the tile.

The cooing doves flit from feeder to branch. When they are still,
one preens the other. He seems to sing a love song just for her.
I expect she’ll be resting on a nearby nest soon.

Only three years of an incapacitated old age remained
for Mom after Dad died. They loved each other
but, in the end, did not take care of each other
as tenderly as the doves do.

Talking with Dad

The strangest feeling just hit me,
as I sat down for Poetry Hour
in a new home. I almost said it
out loud: I should let Daddy know
that I’m into the apartment.

It sounds right doesn’t it, until
you know that Dad’s been gone now,
these last thirty-one years.
Why now, I wonder, definitely
out loud this time.

Maybe it’s because Daddy
always had my back, had some
miraculous power to make hard things
turn out the best they could, mostly
with me unharmed in any way.

If Dad could still be here doing that,
he would, so I want to tell Dad tonight
that I–helped by my grown sons–
have landed in the right place for an old gal,

at the perfect time, that I’m safe here,
meeting folks I think he’d like,
and that I moved for the best reason–
I feel so alive here in this fine apartment.

And Daddy, I wish you could see it!