Cynthia Bargar says that "the stories of the day thrill me as do the dream stories of the night. Replaying these, putting them together, taking them apart, giving shape, is how I view the process that leads to my poems. The terrible suffering, personal and global, and the consciousness we bring or don't bring to it are of great interest to me. What we do to ourselves and others, how we treat ourselves and others in the name of living our lives and how we acknowledge or deny that we are all on a path toward one inevitable and common end are subjects that inform my work." Cynthia splits her time between Boston and Provincetown, Massachusetts, traveling back and forth with her husband, Nick Thorkelson, and her dog, Betsy. Contact Cynthia

    U as in Undertaker

	My mother and I never spoke of the dead, too remindful of recent and not so recent losses. But we did talk about the undertaker, who loved my mother's telephone voice. At Swan Pointe Cemetery greenhouse gardeners wooed her with prize specimens, exquisite hot-house varieties, coaxed into beauty for the dead and those who came to bury the dead. We ran out of vases her first summer — pickle jars full of hot pink peonies graced our credenza. Even my grandfather's four folding snack tables stood open in the living room laden with graveyard blooms. And when he met my mother, the undertaker was not disappointed.

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