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Roberta Feins

Roberta Feins

Listen to Roberta read Self Portrait As Romantic Literature from Cortland Review

Roberta Feins was born in New York, and has lived in North Carolina and Seattle. She has degrees in Social Science (BA) and Marine Ecology (MS), and received her MFA in poetry in 2007 from New England College where she studied with Judith Hall, Carol Frost, DA Powell and Alicia Ostriker.

Roberta’s poems have been published in Five AM, Antioch Review, The Cortland Review and The Gettysburg Review, among others. Prizes include First Prize in Poetry, Women in Judaism’s 2010 Writing Competition, and Second Place in the 2007 Society for Humanistic Anthropology Ethnographic Poetry Competition.

Roberta edits the e-zine Switched On Gutenberg (http://www.switched-ongutenberg.org/) and has selected poetry for Drash: Northwest Mosaic and the Naugatuck River Review.

Something Like a River

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Poem from Something Like A River

After Li-Po’s Song on Bringing in the Wine

See how the Columbia River
pours from the Canadian Cascades,
races wildly to the Pacific, never returns.
Fix your hair in the hall mirror, dear.

Just yesterday, we were natural brunettes;
this evening’s color pours from a bottle.
Never mind. An empty smile makes the moon cry.

Forget our crass bosses, investment failures,
losing Scratch Ticket. Let’s just wave
our plastic at the clerk, grab
the Pale Ale, nachos, Ballard Bitter.

Remember the time we dragged Jeff
down Mission Street by his coat collar?
We’ll be telling that story long after

the ping of acoustic sensors finds
no salmon left to count. Turn up the music,
let’s dance to that song Ralph played
on his tinny tape deck at Rocky Reach.