I knew when my father told me

he was drawing our family tree

for a frontispiece to his memoirs

and including a number of cousins

he’d just discovered online

and never met

that he was going to leave out

his own child, my sister, who

was born and died the same winter:

he had never been a man to

associate himself with failure.

And he did not disappoint.

Lynn Gilbert has had poems in Concho River Review, Exquisite Corpse, The Journal of Poetry Therapy, Kansas Quarterly, Peninsula Poets, Southwestern American Literature, The Texas Observer, Third Wednesday, several regional anthologies, and the four-poet collection Four Shields of Power (Plain View Press, Austin), among others. She helps edit poetry for Third Wednesday and was a founding editor of Borderlands. Her most-read poem is a haiku displayed in 40 Austin city buses since 2013. (2019)