Holly Guran
American Pie bye bye the plane crash 13 years past Buddy Holly on his way to Fargo to do his wash which somehow he couldn’t do in Clear Lake Iowa the day the music died other griefs enter bow slightly never really leave the sixties’ hope falling in the plane of young musicians this will be the day that I die planes of US soldiers the Vietnamese never found the good old boys drafted and gone That same year back from Rome not quite believing what I’d lost a husband an extended family two cultures I’d stolen the cascading tapestry of Rome’s lush history gilded on the present Ukrainian life shared by his family who fled in world war II Buddy’s widow his high school sweetheart she’s Jackie Kennedy she’s me she’s lots of us the day the music died
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Holly Guran, author of Twilight Chorus, River of Bones, and the chapbooks River Tracks and Mothers’ Trails, earned a Massachusetts Cultural Council award and coordinates a popular Boston reading series. Her work appeared in journals including Mom Egg Review, Poet Lore, Poetry East, Borderlands, Worcester Review,and Salamander. Her narrative poems, based on a 19th century correspondence between a mill girl and the editor she married, have been performed in Boston and other locations.