The Day After Christmas Day by Mary Kennan Herbert St. Stephen O soul mate keeper of Christmas you should be here now see all this paper and ribbon and cards that don't match the gifts behold the glittering packaging that now goes into my trash bag of dreams one ribbon of silver found behind the sofa spiraled like a Slinky loath to give up its signage of merriment its job was joy even when hiding back there amongst shadows and dust bunnies of holidays past funny how I hated to religate it to the lawn & leaf reliquary while the light still danced on its moon-dazzling sheen spilling forth into coils and ripples worthy of streams of unborn festivals to come as I wax euphoric and full of nonsense the clean-up committee is light in the head all too eager to follow the King into the midnight snow Martha reeling out faith like ribbons or sparkling twine with no end much like yesterday's champagne flute full of little stars that bubble up like poems Copyright © 1999 Mary Kennan Herbert All Rights Reserved

Originally from the Midwest (St. Louis, Missouri), Mary Kennan Herbert now lives in Brooklyn, New York. Following a career as a senior editor in book publishing, she now teaches writing courses at the Borough of Manhattan Community College in New York City, at the Brooklyn campus of Long Island University, and at other colleges in the New York City area. She has led creative writing workshops for St. Francis College in Brooklyn, Bryn Mawr College, and the Vermont Writers League. Her poems have appeared in College English, Theology Today, The Chattahoochee Review, The Dominion Review, Hiram Poetry Review, Architrave, The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Spectrum, Penumbra, The Alembic, The Brownstone Review, Paris/Atlantic, The Plaza, Terra Nova, Fan, The Month, Aireings, The Vanderbilt Review, The Santa Monica Review, The Arkansas Review, College English Notes, Isle, and numerous other literary journals and periodicals in the United States, Canada, England, Wales, Australia, France, Finland, and Japan, and have been selected for five anthologies. Ms. Herbert holds a degree in art from Peabody College in Nashville, Tennessee, and a master's degree (M.A.) in creative writing with an emphasis on poetry, from The City College of New York, where she received three scholarships and the Jane Specter Award for graduate creative writing. Her first collection of poems has been published by Ginninderra Press in Australia (January 1998), which will also publish her second book, in 1999. She has been invited to read her poetry at numerous events, including the 1998 and 1999 New Jersey Book Fair and the 1998 Baltimore Book Festival.