Amy Lowell Prize Honorable Mention, selected by Martha Collins
Groveland, Massachusetts, Summer 1979
It’s the oldest ginkgo tree in the entire Merrimack Valley or so Delma tells me as we stand there beside its giant trunk ice-cold gin and tonic in her hand both of us looking up at the narrow branches bedecked with fan-like leaves the very last of their kind all the way from the Paleocene says Henry clinking ice in his glass squinting through his spectacles sipping and wearing a hat just like my grandfather because we are in the very last days when men still wore hats and their lawn stretched green and hazy from their house to the very river itself and people would give their eye teeth to have this riverfront now my grandmother said her lips frosted pale pink with a rare bit of lipstick her dark grey hair curled up around her ears to frame her dangling earrings beaded in a way not unlike the bracelet on Delma’s own wrist which they tell me when I point out they match that both were bought on a trip they took to Bangkok in the very last days before women commonly traveled on their own but no one travels really travels like they did back then when it took days to get anywhere and everyone dressed up for flights or even to meet people at the airport since it was such a special occasion and Henry and Delma were themselves just back from the Argentine they called it with a laugh the sunlight dappling the tree the tree-light dappling the lawn the river ablaze in late summer’s light beyond and not a single sound other than ice in their glasses and the laughter in their eyes at the promise of a few hands of whist after dinner while I slept under an afghan on a sofa upholstered with pale pink roses that didn’t feel as if anyone had ever used it even once before and one afternoon after my father died I borrowed my mother’s car to fetch us ice cream and took 110 instead of 114 because I hadn’t driven up there for years and I saw the sign for Groveland and traced my way by instinct to where Henry and Delma’s house would have stood and I snuck back through who knows whose yard just to see if this dream was real and there it was 270 million years old the giant ginkgo whose importance no one now remembers or even Henry and Delma and the perfect magic of their existence except five year old me riding in the back of a great boat of an orange Cadillac convertible because my grandparents were babysitting that night but couldn’t pass up the promise of a few hands of whist
Jeremy Faro is a writer and naming consultant who lives between Cambridge and Provincetown, Massachusetts with his husband and their dog. A graduate of Harvard and Cambridge universities and a Fulbright Scholar, he was chosen as writer-in-residence by both Nuoren Voiman Liitto (Sysmä, Finland) and the Kamov Foundation (Rijeka, Croatia) and his translation of Gábor Lanczkor’s Goya’s Deaf House was a semi-finalist for the 2018 Tomaž Šalamun Prize.