ABIGAIL THOMAS POEMS
Yesterday
by Abigail Thomas
(formerly, Abigail Luttinger, 1977)
I ate 16 oranges
2 rosaries, ½ pound
Of iron and 12 assorted coins.
My ankles swelled up.
I telephoned my sister
In Boston
To tell her I took
Tap dancing lessons, even
Had a collapsible floor
And special shoes. Of course
Daddy never noticed
Just kept reading the paper.
Now I make up poems
And swallow things.
Fathers suck,
My sister said.
published in a magazine in 1977 called Thirteen Moon
Abigail Thomas, the daughter of renowned science writer Lewis Thomas (The Lives of a Cell), is the mother of four children and the grandmother of twelve. Her academic education stopped when, pregnant with her oldest daughter, she was asked to leave Bryn Mawr during her first year. She’s lived most of her life on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and was for a time a book editor and for another time a book agent. Then she started writing for publication. Her first three books “Getting Over Tom,” “An Actual Life,” and “Herb’s Pajamas” were works of fiction. Her memoir, “A Three Dog Life,” was named one of the best books of 2006 by the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. It won the 2006 Inspirational Memoir Award given by Books for A Better Life. She is also author of “Safekeeping,” a memoir, and “Thinking About Memoir,” and “What Comes Next and How to Like It” was published by Scribner in 2014. Her new book “Still Life at Eighty: the next interesting thing, is out from Golden Notebook Press, 2023.
