Gina Ferrara

Gina Ferrara lives in New Orleans.  She has five poetry collections, including Amiss, published by Dos Madres Press in 2023, a finalist for the Eyelands Poetry Prize.   Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Poetry Ireland Review, Tar River Poetry and The Southern Review andwas also selected for inclusion in the Sixty-Four Best Poets of 2019 by Black Mountain Press.  Since 2007, she has curated The Poetry Buffet, a monthly reading series in New Orleans.  She teaches English and writing at Delgado Community College and is the editor of the New Orleans Poetry Journal Press.

My Sapphire Shoes (March, 2020)

Perusing site after site, without leaving home,
I bought shoes the color of sapphires during the pandemic,
as the bees in the backyard
swarmed, built their sprawling flag shaped hive.

Workers, hardly seen, though heard laboring
the lantana, the roses, the orange cosmos,
the apple tree blossoms, those
providing a superlative nectar coup
to bring back to the queen.

The weft and weave becoming waxier, more amber,
holding weighted viscosity, honied evidence
as people were intubated rolled on their sides, even
my friend Melanie, hospitalized, who wouldn’t come home.

She would have liked my sapphire shoes,
recognized they were like birthstones,
a bit deeper than the sapphires of Ceylon
that shared the clarity and color of a March sky,
the one above the oblivious bees.

I had no place to wear my sapphire shoes,
except outside where they looked strange
and inappropriate in their gemstone blueness
when the buzzing, the din, took on sounds of a dirge.