Linda Benninghoff

TO MARGARET

When I heard that news
I walked for hours,
remembered how we settled five years ago
in that red row house,
hunched over meals,
slipped out in the sloppy rain,
after cigarettes, drinks, men.
I remember
your smile, that some days
believed in itself completely,
your dark hair and eyes like mine,
Mondays in the pizza parlor
called Never on Sunday,
Tuesdays in the dark local bar.
Up and down
the New Jersey Turnpike
I thought of you—
yet we were never close friends,
and in those days
I could never like
my own resemblance.
For years we were roommates,
yet only rarely looked up
at the moon, blinked
at the sun, only rarely
remembered what it is
that people do when they know
that they, too, can feel.
But the railings on these buildings
are iron and cold.
The rain rings
like tambourines in my ears.
In summer
the dust falls
speck by speck,
and I know
we were uprooted,
went everywhere hard,
yet never strong.
uncertain
like flowers that swung
in a wind too full of its own longings
to hold us—
living and striving
in this gray city called Baltimore,
the city where you died
on a winter day.
You could not feel
that we loved you,
as we did,
yet only as other travelers can,
never quite at ease
in these loud streets, never singing.

Linda Benninghoff attended Johns Hopkins University where she was an English major. She got a Masters in English with an emphasis on creative writing. While living in Baltimore, she trained to be an advocate for the disabled, and used this skill when she worked as a journalist. Her first full-length book, Whose Cries Are Not Music, has a section in it on disability.