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Sizes
My sister found our father’s ring,
turquoise faded, sullied silver-plate.
It stopped my breath. Thirty years ago
I took it from his cold hand.
A big man, he never took it off,
not when he dug or swung or swam,
or smeared on huckleberry jam,
or held a cribbage peg, or gripped
a favorite pitching wedge, then fudged
his score again. With feeling,
she placed it on my palm,
we his keepers. I slipped it on.
It hung, slack, wanting more.
It stung. Once, the shoes. Now this.
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Greg McBride spent a year as an Army photographer in Vietnam, then thirty years practicing law in Washington, DC, before discovering contemporary poetry in his fifties. It changed his life. In 2005 he became founding editor of the Innisfree Poetry Journal. At the age of 63, he won the Boulevard emerging poet prize. His book Porthole won the Liam Rector First Book Prize. ["Sizes" first appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review.]
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