Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2022
Thanks for meeting me for coffee Luanne Castle The barista sneaks cynical peeks at me talking around my tea sips. She doesn’t see you sitting here. Without your signature hoodie would she know you from posters? Every bedtime my mother told me how you found your grandmother in the closet and chased off a wolf. What a brave little girl you were. I needed to be brave, too, fearing his sometimes gnashing teeth. As a teen I learned the huntsman (merely a hunter after some prey) saved you; I waited for my own, mounted and in glinting steel. I searched for the beginning of your story and discovered you were lost when you believed him. All gone. On a milk carton missing. Now you’re saying that’s wrong. Every version is someone else’s story.
Luanne Castle's Kin Types (Finishing Line Press), a chapbook of poetry and flash nonfiction, was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. Her first collection of poetry, Doll God, winner of the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for Poetry, was published by Aldrich Press. Luanne has been a Fellow at the Center for Ideas and Society at the University of California, Riverside. She studied English and Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside (PhD); Western Michigan University (MFA); and Stanford University. Her Pushcart and Best of the Net-nominated poetry and prose have appeared in Copper Nickel, American Journal of Poetry, Pleiades, River Teeth, TAB, Verse Daily, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Saranac Review, Grist, and other journals. An avid blogger, she can be found at luannecastle.com. She lives in Arizona, where she shares land with a bobcat.
6
