by Janelle Lynch
Letter to a Fellow Survivor
for Thomas
Our departed visit me as you travel
Europe.
Gary first, his hollowed body losing warmth,
his spirit rising when you climb a final time
onto his bed. Stanely, in his wheelchair,
me by his side on the sunlit patio. We’re holding
hands in silence when Jimmie’s words breeze by
assuring us it’s not so hard, this dying.
All those brave young men to AIDS.
I am so thankful you are not among them,
that I still hear your tales of toasting with your nephews
in an Irish pub, picture you diving off a jagged rock
into an Italian sea, savoring a peach gelato on a cobbled street –
even in your sixties still ripe for a tempestuous affair.
By now you are a board a train to Paris, French spilling
from your mouth as smooth as that Italian cream.
Your journey lifts me back into the night
I lay in a train from Paris to Spain, my passport gone
to the conductor when I crossed the border, feeling unfettered
as I unwound across the moonlit sheets of my upper bunk
rocking to the rhythm of rails below
galloping to Lorca on a raging steed.
Oh, let us squeeze every drop of juice from life,
its meat, heart-dark purple as plums from my yard,
sweetness slithering down our chins in remembrance
of the succulence of youth while we lavish the blessings
of old age so mercifully bequeathed us.
Ruth Mota currently lives and writes in Santa Cruz, California after residing a decade in Brazil and working throughout Latin America and Africa as an international health trainer focused on AIDS. Besides writing poetry, she enjoys facilitating poetry circles to groups inher community like veterans, seniors and men in jail. Over fifty of her poems have been published in online and print journals. Her first chapbook, Kitchen Table Midwife of the Dispossessed, is due to be released soon by Finishing Line Press.
Janelle Lynch is an artist based in New York City. Her photographs have been exhibited worldwide and are in museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Victoria and Albert Museum; and the Denver Art Museum. She has three monographs by Radius Books, Los Jardines de México; Barcelona; and Another Way of Looking at Love. Her work has been featured in publications including The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, and The Guardian. In 2019, Lynch was shortlisted for The Prix Pictet and in 2024 she was the subject of a documentary film, Janelle Lynch: Endless Forms Most Beautiful. She is faculty at the International Center of Photography and is represented by Flowers Gallery.