Irene Fick
Pine Row Issue No. 10 Spring 2025 - Featured Poet
Interiors
Women in my wider family were boundless
inside clear, tight borders, roamed free
among the detritus of lace doilies, aging china,
ceramic ladies with rosebud lips, sofas
and matching chairs embalmed in plastic.
Theirs were ordinary lives lived indoors
inhaling the pall of static air.
Women in my wider family were alert to threats
on the other side of the door. They sensed
catastrophe around each corner, dwelled
on the news: muggings in the street,
(in broad daylight!), stabbings on the subway.
So many wrongs on the other side of the door,
yet they took such comfort in the stony Virgin
who blessed, protected their tiny lawns.
Women in my wider family missed my mother
who lived half a country away, who shared
their melancholy, fears, firm refusal to ever fly.
Women in my wider family mourned my mother
who was the first to die, a woman who rarely
ventured beyond the home.
I recall the autumn chill as we left her room
on the third floor, carried the remains of her stay.
I recall how the sky trembled, the leaves festered
beneath our feet as we began the long drive home
to a house that no longer sheltered a mother inside.
About the poem: as shared by the poet
From the Desk of the Poet:
I often write about my large Italian extended family and it always struck me how the women lived their lives indoors. I realized later in life that they trusted their "indoor" environments and felt safe, not threatened for the world at large. Poems about my family, along with many others, are featured in my new poetry collection, The Fragility of Winter, recently published by Broadstone Books (Frankfort, Kentucky).
Irene Fick is the author of The Wild Side of the Window (Main Street Rag) and The Stories We Tell (Broadkill Press). Both received first place awards from the National Federation of Press Women. Irene’s poems have been published in such journals as Delmarva Review, Gargoyle, The Broadkill Review, The Blue Mountain Review and Willawaw Journal. A third poetry book, her first full-length manuscript, was recently published by Broadstone Books. Irene’s essays have appeared in River Teeth Journal, the Schuylkill Valley Journal and Hippocampus. She lives in Lewes and can be reached at irenefickpoet.com.
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