This selection, chosen by guest editor john compton, is from Nighttime by Marina Hope Wilson (Cooper Dillon Books 2024).
Driving Lessons
Grief is an invisible skin. You
wear someone’s life in your own.
Even the way I parallel park is him.
For a mediocre driver, I’m pretty good.
Crank the wheel one way,
then the other at the midpoint.
You have to go all in or know
when you’ve botched the geometry.
Commit or start over.
No, that’s not right either.
Grief is closer and further
away. Always both.
Marina Hope Wilson is the author of the chapbook, Nighttime (Cooper Dillon Books, 2024). Her poems have appeared in journals such as The Massachusetts Review, $, trampset, Stirring, Bicoastal Review, and SWWIM Every Day. Marina is a 2024-25 Friends of the San Francisco Public Library Brown-Handler Artist-in-Residence. She lives in San Francisco with her husband, stepdaughter, and two cats, and she makes her living as a speech-language therapist. 
