Below, check out Best of Adroit: 2010-2013 contributor Ruth Foley reading her poem “In Another Life,” and be sure to check out the full issue this spring, online or in print!
I’ve written a great deal about the death of my foster sister in a car accident when I was eleven and she was twenty-five. She always seemed so grown-up to me–when I turned twenty-five, then twenty-six, I started wondering what she would have thought of me as an adult, and then I suppose it was natural for me to begin to wonder what I would have thought of her. I started work on this poem sometime after what would have been her fiftieth birthday, when she had suddenly been dead for longer than she was alive–and for much longer than she lived with us. I don’t know if she would have come into her own in any of the ways I list here, but it makes me happy to think she might have.
Ruth Foley lives in Massachusetts, where she teaches English for Wheaton College. Her recent work is appearing or forthcoming in Sou’wester, The Bellingham Review, Yemassee, and Caesura, among others. Her chapbook, Dear Turquoise, is available from Dancing Girl Press. She also serves as Managing Editor for Cider Press Review.
