It was when she finished her housework and she wandered through the hollow rooms in the old farmhouse where nothing moved her eyes seeing something so far away something I could not see that I heard her sing in a voice I could barely hear

‘I was dancing with my darling to the Tennessee waltz’‍ ‍

that I realized the woman I knew as my mother had another life a life I never knew.

Nina Craig is a citizen of northern Michigan’s Little Traverse Bay Band of Odawa Indians. She was raised in the Upper Peninsula and now resides in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she writes poetry and memoir and is active with local and regional poetry and writing groups. She is a member of the Eastern Shore Writers Association board of directors and Swamp Fire Writers. Her work has appeared in U.P. Reader, the Saginaw Chapbook Project’s anthology Among the Happy Poets: Theodore Roethke’s Influence in a Time of Disruption, and the Poetry Society of Michigan’s blog.