Each Day More

a poetry chapbook by

Elisa Albo

ISBN: 978-1-59948-491-4, 38 pages, $11 cover price

($8 if purchased from the MSR Online Bookstore)

Release Date: October 14, 2014

Elisa Albo is the author of a previous collection of poems, Passage to America, available as an ebook. Her poems have been published in literary journals and anthologies, including Alimentum, Bomb Magazine, Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Stream Magazine, International Literary Quarterly, Irrepressible Appetites, MiPoesias, The Potomac Journal, and Tigertail: A South Florida Annual. She teaches English and ESL at Broward College. Born in Havana and raised in Lakeland, Florida, she lives with her husband and daughters in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Time is a fragile thing in these intimate, graceful poems that remind us of the temporary nature of the everyday. Transcendent and bittersweet, Each Day More explores the trajectory of loss and grief, and in the process, reclaims the joys of human connection, the tender threads that bind us to one another and to the world. –Silvia Curbelo

I have long been an admirer of Elisa Albo’s poetry, but in these poems her voice shines like never before. I am completely taken by the sadness and wisdom in these poems. Like great philosophy, Albo lets us understand mortality as well as the triumph of the immortal human spirit. These elegies are sad, yes, but more so they confirm one of the most unique and enduring qualities of our humanity, our ability to survive emotionally and spiritually all the great losses that we all experience in our own lives. She makes sense of it all through the mystery and beauty of art. –Richard Blanco, Presidential Inaugural Poet and author of Looking for The Gulf Motel

Elisa Albo’s Each Day More should be read and then read again. These exhilarating and heartbreaking poems require attention and invite reflection. They are smart and tender, intellectually provocative and emotionally stunning. They celebrate family and friends, love and loss, and offer a bracing antidote to the ironic skepticism and fashionable obscurantism favored in some literary circles. Elisa Albo knows that we are alone and that we cling to one another in our sadness. — John Dufresne, No Regrets, Coyote

Each Day More

for Alexander Standiford

How do we negotiate
this one, the utter fragility
between here and gone,
the thinnest filament?
An eighteen-year-old,
your youngest, the baby
you cradled, fed with
mother fingers, father
hands, the boy you
photographed to capture
and keep still, present.

How you fussed
and worried, driving
him to games, movies
with friends, so many
lessons, college, away
into the world.

How do we carry on?
How do we look into
mother eyes, your father
face, the sibling hearts?

His life loomed large
with yours, buoyed by books
art food music, by laughter
we gathered each August
of his life in the ritual
of welcoming new
students with the old.

Then we entered your
home not in summer,
a space suspended
between the ache of the gravel
driveway and the blades
of grass in the backyard,

the chill of the pool water
and the shade of the rooftop patio,
leaving us poised with pain
in air we’re made to breathe,
untethered, as if the gravity
that holds a child to the earth
has lost some of its force,
and there is too much sky,
each day more.

Tap-tap

Tap-tap comes from the closet.
Behind the door, nothing.
I return to the bathroom sink.
Tap-tap. A knock into silence,
like air in a bottle recently capped.

I walk into the closet, peer beneath
dresses hung like deflated bodies,
see small limbs, tangled, moving.
My young daughters jump out
laughing, “We’re playing with you!”

They don’t know I’m dressing
for a funeral, my mind on a colleague,
forty years old, who died in her sleep.
They don’t know I’m grieving
for an old friend, nearly sixty,

cancer, who taught me teaching,
poetry, friendship. The day before,
I’d called my husband to tell him
about the two deaths. He had news,
his voice exuberant—my cousin

in New York had given birth, twin girls,
wet and wailing into the world—
Rachel and Rebecca, ancient names,
our great aunts. Tap-tap. Two gone.
Tap-tap. Two here, tap-tap.

September, 2012

A college kid in Gainesville killed his friend,
bought a shovel and duct tape four days
before, wouldn’t tell police where
he buried the body of Christian
Aguilar, the parents frantic,
searching.

In Miami a man drove his five-year-old son
to school, his six-month-old daughter
to daycare, not his usual morning
routine. Car windows rolled up
tight for safety, he worked all
day, picked up his son,
who climbed into
the backseat and
found his baby
sister.

In California a chef killed his wife,
then boiled her for
four days.

A colleague from the paper told my husband
another journalist saw his son off
to college. A couple of weeks
later, the young man slipped
in the shower, hit
his head, died.

My seven-year-old
rides her bike up and down
the street. My husband watches her
from the carport, reads the paper. She wears
a baseball cap. I go out, insist she put on a helmet.
No, she says, It’s uncomfortable. Her father
hands it to her. It’s the law, I say,
metaphysical too, I think,
small comfort.