Key West The Newspaper

by Kirby Congdon…….

Editors often put their best material near the front of their productions to catch the attention that is most worth it. Was this happening in the current Blue Collar Review? The poem on page 2, “Jackie Kennedy’s Hats” by Robert Cooperman out there in Denver is clear and memorable.

When Jackie loses her hat as the President is shot, the poet’s father, a hat maker, responds, “There goes my business.” The poem ends this way:

“…Dad couldn’t help but love Kennedy’s beautiful wife,
then widow, but never trusted her again.”

That is funny and sad as well as important. The editor, Al Markovitz, shows us that the difficulties in being hard up through circumstances beyond our control don’t always depend on personal hardship. Larger events can be emotionally subtle, like the actions of government figures we have voted into office who go astray when so many of us rely on their behaving well.

Mary Franke brings us more work on dealing with stress. She describes in detail how I feel at transportation centers: lost! Let me quote her last stanza:

The sun does not love us
like it did
like we think it did.