She wants to be swallowed by the hotel lobby and who can blame her. One day out of Amman and she’s breathless, overwhelmed by the exposed skin of other women. Her husband ignores her; he would rather argue with the desk clerk over the weekend rates like he does with the vendors over shoes at the outdoor market of Souk Jara. Without looking at his wife, he tells her to sit in a corner. Swirls of the night sky of the desert inhabit the fabric covering her body. She dissolves into it. Impossible for the sun to penetrate. Only the sound of her husband’s loud demands can get through. What she wants right now is not a hotel room, but the smell of cut lemons from her mother’s orchard in the Jordan River valley. Her nostrils breathe the pungent air and she forgets everything: his voice, his skin, his mouth against her bare breast.

Linda Nemec Foster

is the author of 12 poetry collections, including Amber Necklace from Gdansk (a finalist for the Ohio Book Award in Poetry; Louisiana State University Press, 2001), The Lake Michigan Mermaid with Anne-Marie Oomen (2019 Michigan Notable Book; Wayne State University Press, 2018), The Elusive Heroine: My Daughter Lost in Magritte (Cervena Barva Press, 2018), Talking Diamonds (New Issues Press, 2009), and Listen to the Landscape (Eerdmans Publishing, 2006). Her most recent poetry book, The Blue Divide, was published in 2021 by New Issues Press.

Ms. Foster’s work has appeared in more than 350 magazines and journals such as The Georgia Review, New American Writing, Nimrod, North American Review, Quarterly West, Paterson Literary Review, Witness, and Verse Daily. Her poems have also been published in anthologies in the U.S. and Great Britain, and translated in Europe. Collaborations with visual artists, musicians, and composers have brought her poetry to new venues and audiences. It has been exhibited in museums and galleries, set to music, produced for the stage, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

In 2018 and 2019, Ms. Foster won an Editor’s Choice Award in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Contest sponsored by The Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College and Paterson Literary Review. She has been honored with awards from the Arts Foundation of Michigan, ArtServe Michigan, the National Writer’s Voice, and the Academy of American Poets. She is the founder of the Contemporary Writers Series at Aquinas College, and was the first Poet Laureate of Grand Rapids, Michigan (serving from 2003-2005). In 2015, she was honored by the Dyer-Ives Foundation for her poetry and advocacy of the literary arts in Michigan. In the fall of 2019, she was a guest lecturer in contemporary American poetry and literature at the University of Bielsko-Biala in Poland.

Author’s website: www.lindanemecfoster.com