Bio

Dede Cummings’ poetry has been published in Mademoiselle, The Lake, InQuire, Vending Machine Press and Connotation Press. She was a Discover/The Nation poetry semi-finalist. She started her publishing career at Little, Brown after graduating from Middlebury College where she was the recipient of the Mary Dunning Thwing Award for poetry, and in 1991 studied with Hayden Carruth at the Bennington Writers’ Workshop. She was a poetry contributor at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in 2013 and is currently at work on her first poetry collection and a creative nonfiction called Spin Cycle. She lives in West Brattleboro, Vermont with her family where she runs a home office for the publishing company Green Writers Press.

Lament of the Glaciers

. . . for not even the flutter of a fly's wing is as fast as change.
—Simonides of Ceos

I pray to the final human being
on earth, the last one standing,
on the edge of what once was
thick blue gray ice the size
of Manhattan. She is not
wrapped in fur, but laced
with claw marks from ivory talons;
she squints through cataracts,
tormented by what remains
of what was once a frozen sea,
to find a precipice; she
drops to all fours, looks around,
and panting from the effort,
throws a stone in the direction
of the wind.