by Linda Bamber

For a cloth

green moss

on a felled pine’s base.

More or less correctly set

some needles, brown,

the cutlery. And then

the feast:

one black bark shred

damp and creased.

Linda Bamber is a Professor of English at Tufts University. Her poetry collection, Metropolitan Tang, and her fiction collection, Taking What I Like, were both published by David R. Godine. Bamber’s work has appeared in periodicals such as The Harvard Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, The New York Times Book Review, The Kenyon Review, Plume and The Missouri Review. Her book on Shakespeare was published by Stanford University Press. She is currently writing a novella based on the cross-country expedition of Lewis and Clark.