Maria Castro Dominguez – Widow

Dominguez profile Dec 2020

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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing, Volume One, December 2020.

Maria Castro Dominguez is the author of ‘A Face in The Crowd’ her Erbacce Press winning collection and ‘Ten Truths from Wonderland’ (Hedgehog Poetry Press) a collaboration with Matt Duggan. She won the third prize in Brittle Star´s Poetry Competition, was highly commended in the Borderlines Poetry Competition and finalist in the Stephen A DiBiase Poetry contest NY. Also she has bee longlisted in Write Out Loud’s Beyond the Storm’s poetry competition. Her poems have appeared in many journals such as Orbis, Obsessed With Pipework, Popshot, The Long-Islander Huntington Journal NY, The Stockholm Review of Literature, Pank Magazine, Empty Mirror, Dream Catcher and London Grip. She has flash fiction published in Out of the Gutter and Friday Flash Fiction. She has a master’s degree in English Philology and is a freelance writer.


Widow

a woman who has lost
a husband by death
a woman who has longing in her heart
but has not married again

I used to be a chess widow
my babies born alone
I called out to him
in pain but he was busy
winning or losing a war

widow
a last word
falling off the cliff of a page
falling on white space
I think of what being a widow
is falling or as the dictionary has it
being empty

they are the same widows
which remind me of a door closing
and somewhere the opening of a window


Ash

I’m listening to the light,
stamping my feet
on your earth to imitate rainfall
to call the earthworms to the surface
and try to persuade them to haul you out.

A bee scrawls a figure eight
around your fragrance
scattering pollen from its tail,
it feels like backdraft of ash blown in
my face momentarily
making my eyes tear-filled.


© Maria Castro Dominguez