July 3, 2023Denise DuhamelAnother Summer of Love

“As a child I memorized Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Land of Counterpane.’ I remember looking up ‘counterpane’ in the dictionary and was delighted to learn that it meant ‘bedspread.’ I suffered from asthma and could relate to Stevenson’s speaker, a bedridden kid. The poem in this issue also has a bedridden character—my mother, who passed away in July 2021.”