The Mother Superior
Opening day: Sister Beatrice Throws Out the First Pitch
by Ellen LaFleche
Sister ascends the mound,
quiets the organist with her palm.
The catcher kneels. He needs a god-damn miracle to rise out of
this minor-league limbo.
The stadium lights flicker on,
glowing in tiered
rows like votive candles.
Beatrice is a Sister of Mercy
but her windup looks brutal,
her leg-kick wicked. The faithful
fans murmur to see the cool white whisper of holy underclothes.
Sister’s hooded head spits forward.
The catcher’s glove opens like a heart,
contracts against the fastball’s whomp
and slam. His head has stopped
hoping for salvation
but his heart holds on.
Organ music booms against the dome.
The leadoff hitter waits.
Twenty years since his last
confession, but he crosses himself,
steps hopefully to the plate.
2011 Philbrick Poetry Project
The Providence Athenaeum is pleased to announce that guest judge Dana Gioia has selected Workers' Rites by Ellen LaFleche as the 2011 honoree of the Philbrick Poetry Project. Workers' Rites, will be published as a chapbook in April.
In selecting Workers' Rites, Mr. Gioia said this: “Reviving the lyrical realist tradition of Sherwood Anderson, Edgar Lee Masters, and Edwin Arlington Robinson, Ellen LaFleche’s collection, Workers’ Rites, creates a gallery of alternately evocative and disturbing portraits. LaFleche introduces each character by profession—midwife, undertaker, parish housekeeper, librarian—suggesting the quotidian quality of what might seem to be ordinary lives. But the real point of Workers’ Rites is to reveal the dark secrets of people we might normally take for granted. No life, the poet insists, is ordinary. To be alive is to be charged with invisible inner forces—consumed by longing, radiant with love, or transformed by imagination—even if we all must put on disguises to earn our daily bread.”
Ellen LaFleche has worked as a journalist and women’s health educator in western Massachusetts. She has published poems in Many Mountains Moving, Juked, Alligator Juniper, Alehouse, and Harpur Palate, among other literary journals. She is a guest editor for Naugatuck River Review and assistant judge for the war poetry contest at Winning Writers. She won the Poets on Parnassus Prize in 2006 for poetry about the medical experience. Her poem, "JacObY", celebrating Red Sox outfielder Jacoby Ellsbury, the first Navajo to play major league baseball, won second prize in the Paradise Poetry contest for a poem about joy.