This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Maggie Rue Hess, is from Elegy with Clouds & by Robin Turner (Kelsay Books 2025).
Keen
—a lamentation for the dead
In the hours just after, someone
said About the obituary, do me a favor.Someone said Don’t use
her maiden name. Leave it out.Someone said the dark web.Someone’s high profile business executive
status. Identity theft! Identity theft!
Identity theft! someone said.
200 words is all we need. All someone’s
friends-in-the-know had said so.
I said 86 years of living. I said
our ancestors. I said Keene.
Keene Keene Keene Keene
Keene Keene Keene times two,
times ten, times twenty. I said
her name. I say it & say it & say.
I count. I wail. I ad infinitum.
Keene Keene Keene Keene. I sing
my mother out of this world.
I sing my mother back.
Robin Turner is the author of two poetry chapbooks: bindweed & crow poison (Porkbelly Press) and Elegy with Clouds & (Kelsay Books). Her work has appeared in Anacapa Review, Pithead Chapel, Rattle, Rust & Moth, Verse Daily, The Texas Observer, and elsewhere. She is a longtime community teaching artist in Dallas currently working with writers from the Cancer Support Community of North Texas. Find her on FB and IG @robinsmithturner.
Maggie Rue Hess (she/her) is a PhD student living in Knoxville, Tennessee, with her partner and their crusty white dog. She serves as Poetry Co-Editor for Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts. Her work has appeared in Rattle, Connecticut River Review, SWWIM, and other publications; her debut chapbook, The Bones That Map Us, was published by Belle Point Press in 2024. Maggie likes to share baked goods with friends and can be found on Instagram as @maggierue_.
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