By Tricia Knoll
Your parents named you after gates at sacred shrines. In last night’s dream, I wrote you a letter, knowing you died fifty years ago of breast cancer. I mentioned new windows in the children’s museum where we worked, clean panes of glass that opened to the wooded park. I included who paid for the renovation, although philanthropy never mattered to you. You were an artist, not a fundraiser. Windows served as focal points for what you could draw: children dancing at the maypole or splashing in the wading pool. Perhaps dragons and paper sailboats. Bob claimed credit for the windows, but he’s been dead for thirty years. You and I knew he could be a genius, friend, fiend, or foe. Whatever we said to him might be used against us. Despite policies about deaccessioning artifacts, he gave the museum’s taxidermy polar bear to an unemployed man who hauled the arsenic-laden creature down the freeway in a pick-up truck. I suppose now it stands inside a bar beside a stage for a band or DJ in a dopey Oregon one-bar town. Torii, can you come back? I understand more now about being bi. We should talk. My treat at the bistro where the owner makes righteous lattes topped with perfect hearts. Or the fronds of sword ferns.
Tricia Knoll’s The Unknown Daughter, contains personal poems from people who visit the Tomb of the Unknown Daughter and was a finalist in the 2025 New England Poetry Club chapbook contest. Wild Apples (Fernwood Press) details downsizing and moving 3,000 miles from Oregon to Vermont. Fernwood Press will publish “Gathering Marbles” in July 2027. Knoll is a Contributing Editor of Verse Virtual. Website: triciaknoll.com