She Was My Friend
Meredith Trede
I wrote a note.
My boy had joined
the Marine Corps.
She wrote back glad
that her grandson,
a musician,
shared her morals.
And that was that.
Meredith Trede’s collection, Tenement Threnody, persona poems in voices from her city childhood, is from Main Street Rag Press. Stephen F. Austin State University Press published Field Theory. A Toadlily Press founder, her chapbook, Out of the Book, was in Desire Path. Her extensive journal publications include Barrow Street, Cortland Review, Friends Journal, Witness, and The Paris Review. She was granted fellowships at Blue Mountain Center, Ragdale, Saltonstall, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She serves on the Slapering Hol Press Advisory Committee.
Of her two poems in this issue of Collateral, Trede writes, “They are part of a manuscript that began when my grandson joined the Marines. The knot of fear that surrounds the poems has not been diminished by their writing. But it is only in writing that I can stumble my way through the fog of endless war and more unnecessary death, as the political becomes all the more personal.”