Linda Lerner

Preparations Made 

My father and I are having an argument on
opposite sides of a border dividing two countries,
their names, irrelevant. What isn’t: my father is dead
and the border is the same one I stood back from
as a girl, I’m now standing on preparing for a trip

to Amsterdam; it will include the area my father
may have lived in for three years on leaving Russia,
a man I haven’t seen in decades, so easy to be with
recalled from time to time

those half-wished regrets like eye floaters
that can suddenly pop up

I check off touristy things to see, arrange to meet
a man, whose face I can’t remember, for dinner one night
something about a wife coming, too

No connection exists between my father, that man and
a former colleague who went to Amsterdam one summer
and never was heard from again, rumors swirled:
a dangerous place, drugs sold with coffee
in every café

nobody goes there anymore, a neighbor said,
now that it’s legal here

reports of a changing climate and sudden
turbulence in the air 

 

Linda Lerner’s Taking the F Train (NYQ Books, 2021) a finalist in the 2022 Paterson Poetry Prize. Her  latest collection  is How It Was (2020—2021) and Is ,a chapbook of pandemic related poems, by Iniquity Press/vendetta Books, 2023.