Lynn Otto is a freelance copy editor and an adjunct instructor at Portland State University. Her poetry collection Real Daughter won a Unicorn Press First Book Prize and is a finalist for the 2020 Oregon Book Awards.
In This Green Green So Blue
In this green green, a hundred shades,
I feel blue, turning
pancakes on the Coleman stove,
fewer than last year,
fewer than the mother in site 22,
visible through vine maples and huckleberries,
spring-green screen too thin.
Yesterday, like the flycatcher overhead she fussed
poor directions to her husband
as he backed a trailer between the ferns and firs,
without consequence.
Since then, her children and their young spouses,
as if ordered from a catalog,
have arrived.
Beautiful, they laugh together
under the pale green streamers of moss
and smile at their mother,
who sings and sets
the rough wood table for ten.
