David Trinidad and his mother Joyce, graduation from junior high school, 1968.
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Sonnet
The day she died, my mother divided
up her jewelry, placed each piece in Dixie
cups (on which my father had written, with
magic marker, the names of her children
and grandchildren): her aunt’s pearls, her mother-
in-law’s topaz and amethysts, her own
mother’s plain gold cross. Earlier, I’d held
a mirror while she put on her lipstick
(Summer Punch) and ran a comb through what was
left of her hair. She stared at the gray strands
in her hand—not with sadness, but as fact.
When she placed the last ring in the last cup,
she looked up at me and said, “We never
have enough time to enjoy our treasures.”
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David Trinidad is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry. These include Swinging on a Star (Turtle Point Press, 2017), Notes on a Past Life (BlazeVOX [books], 2016), Peyton Place: A Haiku Soap Opera (Turtle Point, 2013), and Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems (Turtle Point, 2011). Digging to Wonderland is forthcoming from Turtle Point in 2022. He is also the editor of A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos (Nightboat Books, 2011) and Punk Rock Is Cool for the End of the World: Poems and Notebooks of Ed Smith (Turtle Point, 2019). Trinidad lives in Chicago, where he is a Professor of Creative Writing/Poetry at Columbia College. [See this link for more poems by David Trinidad.]
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David Trinidad by Billy Sullivan