Poetry by Magin LaSov Gregg

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​Family Portrait Harpers Ferry 

On the first day of spring,
it’s hot enough

For short sleeves, too cold 
for shorts and sandals

Our bodies draw silhouettes along 
grass, we look like 

The shadow portraits
your mother 

Made and hung outside your 
bedroom 

Her gallery of ghosts with 
coal smoke faces 

You notice a barn the color
of Red Vines, licorice

We ate them at the movies, when 
we went to matinees

There’s a wax museum in the distance 
a fake confectionary

Monuments to John Brown, W.E.B. Du Bois
the Niagara Movement

In June, we would have brought 
our baby here 

The way my mother and father 
brought me 

Her first words might have been Mama, 
Shenandoah, Potomac 

Or maybe she would have said dog or 
cat or bird 

I wanted her to love butterflies, wordless 
creatures, West Virginia 

I wanted to photograph her on the mountains,
in the valleys

I wanted us to picnic in this churchyard 
full of Civil War dead

After a hundred years, no one remembers 
their names 

Save the mothers and fathers
buried beside them

and the dandelions who remember everything 





Perennials  

April and on every sidewalk fallen 
blooms: azalea, redbud, pear,
cherry, ornamental and Japanese,
along gravel, in gutters, storm drains.
Yesterday, blossoms drifted onto daffodils 
with names like Riot, Cheer, and Bonanza.
Against the fence, their heads rose
like little zealots, faithful to the end.  
I stepped on rusted fronds returning
to mud, the way we all do. For awhile
it’s God’s art class and all the desks
are covered in hole-punched confetti 
from construction paper the teacher keeps
in a cabinet called wind and sky
and what strange music bids buds to fly 
from a high place to a low one, to shake, 
shimmy and twirl all the way down,
like the last guests to leave a party 
dancing past the doors, singing their return.




Magin LaSov Gregg’s writing has appeared in The Washington Post, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News, The Rumpus, Full Grown People, Solstice Literary Magazine, Bellingham Review, Hippocampus Magazine, Under the Gum Tree, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, and elsewhere. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she lives in Frederick, Maryland, with her husband, Carl, and four fabulous rescue pets. 
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