GLASSWORKS
  • home
  • about
    • history
    • staff bios
    • community outreach
    • affiliations
    • contact
  • Current Issue
    • read Issue 30
    • letter from the editor
    • looking glass spring 2025
    • interview with Dale M. Kushner
    • interview with Jessie vanEerden
  • submit
    • submission guidelines
  • looking glass
    • spring 2025
  • editorial content
    • book reviews
    • opinion
    • interviews >
      • Dale M. Kushner
      • Jessie vanEerden
  • flash glass
    • flash glass 2025
    • flash glass 2024
    • flash glass 2023
    • flash glass 2022
    • flash glass 2021
    • flash glass 2020
    • flash glass 2019
    • flash glass 2018
    • flash glass 2017
    • flash glass 2016
    • flash glass 2015
  • media
    • art
    • audio
    • video
  • archive
    • best of the net nominees
    • pushcart prize nominees
    • read and order back issues
  • Master of Arts in Writing Program
    • about Writing Arts at Rowan University
    • application and requirements
  • Newsletter
  • home
  • about
    • history
    • staff bios
    • community outreach
    • affiliations
    • contact
  • Current Issue
    • read Issue 30
    • letter from the editor
    • looking glass spring 2025
    • interview with Dale M. Kushner
    • interview with Jessie vanEerden
  • submit
    • submission guidelines
  • looking glass
    • spring 2025
  • editorial content
    • book reviews
    • opinion
    • interviews >
      • Dale M. Kushner
      • Jessie vanEerden
  • flash glass
    • flash glass 2025
    • flash glass 2024
    • flash glass 2023
    • flash glass 2022
    • flash glass 2021
    • flash glass 2020
    • flash glass 2019
    • flash glass 2018
    • flash glass 2017
    • flash glass 2016
    • flash glass 2015
  • media
    • art
    • audio
    • video
  • archive
    • best of the net nominees
    • pushcart prize nominees
    • read and order back issues
  • Master of Arts in Writing Program
    • about Writing Arts at Rowan University
    • application and requirements
  • Newsletter
GLASSWORKS
Picture

The Sister of my Oldest Friend Dies from Lung Cancer by Laurel S. Peterson

11/1/2023

0 Comments

 
Picture
​I’m out walking and crying for my friend’s loss and about how hard it was for her to watch her sister slowly disappear, and how the last time I saw my friend, when we had dinner in New York with industrial chic tables and large glasses of wine, she said, we treat animals better than we treat the dying, and all I think about is death: when I wake up, when I fall asleep, when I’m working, and I know what she means and I cry for myself and for all the losses around me, and the people driving by must wonder what’s wrong with me, if they look up from their own problems—and why should they?—and I turn into Lakota Oaks, the conference center that’s going to be a school but used to be a monastery, and you can see the monks’ graveyard at the top of the hill from the long beautiful pond around which I now walk the remaining stations of the cross, an unbeliever amidst the incomprehensible universe, and I think: the universe is big enough to hold my grief without getting hurt itself. I don’t have to carry it all, and the man who was running the trail in the opposite direction passes me again, saying, beautiful day, and it almost is.

Picture
Laurel S. Peterson is an English professor whose poetry has been published in many literary journals. She has two poetry chapbooks, That’s the Way the Music Sounds (Finishing Line) and Talking to the Mirror (Last Automat), and two full-length collections, Do You Expect Your Art to Answer? and Daughter of Sky (Futurecycle). She has also written two mystery novels, Shadow Notes and The Fallen (Woodhall). She is on the editorial board of Inkwell magazine, and the Norwalk Public Library Board, and served as Norwalk, Connecticut’s, Poet Laureate from April 2016 – April 2019.
0 Comments

    FLASH GLASS: A MONTHLY PUBLICATION OF FLASH FICTION, PROSE POETRY, & MICRO ESSAYS


    COVER IMAGE:
    ​"Fabric in the LIGHT #4" 
    Christopher Paul Brown
    ​ISSUE 25

    Categories

    All
    A Baptism
    Colin Bonini
    Crysta Garcia
    Danielle Shorr
    Fetal Pigs
    Flash Fiction
    Gracjan Anthony Kraszewski
    Hannah Rodabaugh
    Heat Advisory
    Hibah Shabkhez
    Historical Graffiti #4
    Holly Day
    If You're Like Me
    Janine DeBaise
    Jenn Powers
    Jillian Law
    Jim Ross
    Julie Holston
    Katee Fletcher
    Kathryn Reese
    Laurel S. Peterson
    Learning To Heal Ourselves
    Melissa Boberg
    Micro Essay
    Not Such Happy Days
    Plagiarism Pays
    Preservation
    Prose Poetry
    Right Now
    Roadside
    Run
    Sometimes
    Sorry For Ruining Everything
    Sunrise On The Farm
    The Principal And The Sea
    The Sister Of My Oldest Friend Dies From Lung Cancer
    When I Hold A Conch Shell To My Ear

    RSS Feed


Picture

Glassworks is a publication of
​Rowan University's Master of Arts in Writing
260 Victoria Street • Glassboro, New Jersey 08028 
[email protected]

​All Content on this Site (c) 2025 Glassworks