Lucia Galloway
Lucia Galloway’s poetry collections are Venus and Other Losses (Plain View) and Playing Outside (Finishing Line).  Recent work appears in Tar River Poetry, Comstock Review, Midwest Quarterly, Inlandia, Mason’s Road, and Poemeleon; as well as in the anthologies Thirty Days (Tupelo) and Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond (Beyond Baroque).  A prize winner out of 3,500 entries in Rhyme Zone’s 2014-15 Poetry Contest for her poem “Open to the Elements,” Galloway also won the 2014 QuillsEdge Press inaugural poetry chapbook competition for The Garlic Peelers.  The same manuscript was a finalist in the Tupelo Press Snowbound Chapbook Competition.  Galloway received her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles.  She lives with her husband, a retired physicist, in Claremont, California.  She sings in a 75-voice concert chorale and hosts “Fourth Sundays,” a monthly poetry reading series.


 from The Garlic Peelers

Naked cloves I’ve just released
from their jackets clump on the cutting board,
each a dormant lantern, its facets retaining a slight heat
from my hand.

Look now:  fire-fly in a vial,
in a teardrop.
Light, but no fire.

Whenever two cloves are called for,
remember to use at least four.  Four is a family,
or five, roasted in a small clay casserole.  Or chopped
and sautéed live in olive oil until they’re straw-hued, golden
and no longer pale.  In these we anticipate
the sweetness of cashew; the brio
of fresh coffee, its hint of bitterness like filbert,
like walnut.  There will be fine sensations,
and tears in the house by night.

© 2016 Lucia Galloway
Lucia Galloway was a Featured Poet at the January 2016 Second Sunday Poetry Series