Aubade for Blue Boy on The Day of His Recovery

Grace Gilbert

“They moved the dock and a person just arrived, popped up. They called me and they said get down here we’ve got a body and I looked and I said what are you talking about and I come out and I say o no,” Mr. John Bergmann, Albany Yacht Club Commodore, April 22 2017

o April
         surreal 
fist

of a month
i retain
  little 

i
   grieve
doubly

&  with tact 

once for the body
   bore   through   

with  brine 

once for the mother

at the overpass
begging the river

  for her blood

Grace Gilbert’s recent poetics & lyric essays can be found in the Adroit Journal, Ninth Letter, the minnesota review, plain china, Anomaly Literary Journal, Pretty Owl Poetry, Maudlin House, Twyckenham Notes, Vox Viola, storm of blue press, Sweet Literary Magazine, tilde, & the Gandy Dancer among others. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and was a finalist in the Princemere Poetry Prize as well as the Adroit Prizes. She is an MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh where she consumes unholy amounts of cheese and dumplings.