This Easter It Snowed All Day,
and we ate take-out ham, collards, and cheese potatoes
from the creole place, ate in solitude because of the world’s isolation,
and in the afternoon watched the 1978 version of Death on the Nile
starring Peter Ustinov whom I mistook for Rod Steiger, who
put his hand through a filing spindle in The Pawnbroker,
which I saw at the University theater in the spring of ’66
with Paul, the high school exchange student from Luxembourg,
with whom I argued passionately about the accepted,
though incorrect usage of “It’s me,” so sure, so American,
while he persisted in saying “It is I,” sincerely, and, lo, properly,
no matter how I tried to convey how uncool it sounded, and
I so wanted him to be cool because we were hopelessly straight,
and probably because of that stubbornness he became a doctor,
and I didn’t, and then the man who wrote letters for a year
on that light blue airmail paper in his excellent script after one
small shaky kiss on the porch before he returned home, and who
said he hoped one day to marry a girl like me, and, perhaps,
did or didn’t, but has left me ever to wonder, and this 2020.
Jane Dickerson earned an MFA at the University of MD, College Park, under the guidance of Stanley Plumly. She's been published in many small magazines and has published the book, The Orange Tree: Early Poems (Levins Publishing 2015). In 2019, Jane was a contributor at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference in VT, an experience she calls "life changing." Her career has had many phases: teaching in rural VT, RN, further teaching at the secondary and college levels, and book editing. Having resided in numerous areas of the Northern and Southern United States, she now resides in MN with her husband.