Gina M. Tabasso
Disrobing

OUT OF PRINT

Pavement Saw Press Chapbook Series
ISBN 1-886350-57-4
32 pages, 6 by 9
Price: $6.00

Gina M. Tabasso, a poet with her M.A. in English, has won numerous awards and been published in Mangrove, The Common Review, Mid-American Review, Slant, Blue Mesa Review, The MacGuffin, and others. She is Senior Editor of a construction trade publication and Associate Editor of Grasslands Review. This is her second published collection.

Poems in this chapbook have appeared in The Cleveland Plain Dealer; The Common Review; Into the Teeth of the Wind, University of California; The Long March of Cleveland (anthology) Green Panda Press; Pavement Saw; Terminus; Wild Thing, Earth's Daughters; and W'ORCs/Aloud Allowed.

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Shelling on the Beach with My Mother

She said to put that seashell down
because it looks like old bones.
In this tide pool there are many deaths
inside of deaths and very few corpses
left intact. Each shell is a broken relic,
a shard of beauty, crabs missing legs,
small white heads that belonged to crayfish,
half life emptied by sand pipers,
turtle and water dragging through
the graveyard. If I told her to lay me
back down on the bed last year
because my blood was missing something,
overcome by itself, she would have refused
to give me back to her creator
as I sunk back into the sand,
became just a shell in her hands.