He plans the memorial exactly one year after she died. The quiet death in Brussels that left him alone. She died while he slept, while the whole city slept: a single tear in the corner of her eye. He tried to collect it in a linen handkerchief before it could evaporate, but what good would that do? She was already part of the air. Better to think ahead, cremate the body, and plan for the memorial service far away. She wanted a lake and a lake she will get: the cold and pristine waters from the Alps in Lake Geneva. Geneva of the expensive lipstick. Geneva of the U.N. diplomats with security badges and pressed suits. Geneva of the hushed rain where he first met her, that woman who is now being scattered on the lake’s calm surface. For a long time, she does not sink. Her ashes cling to the surface, asking one more question of the current under him.

Linda Nemec Foster

is the author of 11 poetry collections, including 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), Amber Necklace from Gdansk (Louisiana State University Press, 2001), and Listen to the Landscape (Eerdmans Publishing, 2006).

Her work has appeared in more than 350 magazines and journals such as The Georgia Review, Nimrod, Witness, New American Writing, North American Review, Quarterly West, Paterson Literary Review, and Verse Daily, and has 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, Foster won an Editor’s Choice Award in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Contest sponsored by Paterson Literary Review. She has also received awards from the Arts Foundation of Michigan, 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, Foster will be a guest lecturer in contemporary American poetry and literature at the University of Bielsko-Biala in Poland.

For more info, visit her website at: www.lindanemecfoster.com

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ The Talent of Knowing in Duende (Issue 2, Spring 2015)

⚡ Two Poems, “Mount Fuji” and “The Dead,” in Streetlight Magazine (23 December 2016)