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"Six Women Laughing"

Sean Dreilinger

Backdrop: spirit mountains,
rustling trees, sounds and scents
of late spring. Evening sun
squanders deepest crimson.
To this we drink and to our lives
come together fleetingly and full.
Birds flash at the feeder, call
of an Eurasian dove, an enormous
bee bumps into the glass.

She launches into story
and we with her.
It's like catching the perfect
wave in unison:
the well, the timing,
the exquisite crescendo,
the ride down.
A riot of laughter,
crash of water and foam,
all six of us swimming
floating, playing
in a gorgeous, heaving ocean.

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Carolyn Pettit Pinet

Carolyn Pettit Pinet was born in South Wales and grew up in Oxfordshire, England. She is winner of an Allen Ginsberg Prize for Poetry and a Pushcart Prize nominee. She received her Ph.D. in Spanish Literature from King’s College, London University in 1973 and taught in the Department of Modern Languages at Montana State University from 1981 to 2011. She has lived in Bozeman for 33 years. "Six Women Laughing" was published in her 2014 collection Tangos, Tamaracks, and the Other Woman.

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