Treadmill
Apologies to Gwendolyn Brooks
We lift weights. We
feel great. We
do yoga. We
eat granola. We
ride bikes. We
take hikes. We
sip green tea. We
do pilates. We
swim laps. Don’t
take naps. We
run miles. We
dress in style. We’re
the Baby Boom. We
die soon.
Barbara Crooker is a previous Light contributor, both in the new online format and the old print version, and her work has appeared in journals such as: Poet Lore, Nimrod, The Green Mountains Review, The Denver Quarterly, Natural Bridge, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry International, The Valparaiso Poetry Review, South Carolina Review, Tar River Review, and The Hollins Critic and anthologies such as: The Bedford Introduction to Literature, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Poem (Wendy Bishop, editor) Worlds in Our Words: Contemporary American Women Writers (Prentice Hall), Good Poems for Hard Times, and Good Poems American Life (Garrison Keillor, editor). Mr. Keillor has read her work 24 times on The Writer’s Almanac, and she’s been fortunate to receive poetry writing fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; the Moulin รก Nef, Auvillar, France; The Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig, Ireland; and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Last fall, she was an invited reader at The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. Her books are Radiance, winner of the Word Press First Book Award (2005) and finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize; Line Dance (Word Press, 2008), winner of the 2009 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence; More (C&R Press, 2010); and Gold (Cascade Books, 2014). Selected Poems is new from FutureCycle Press.