Doris Ferleger, PhD, psychologist and poet, is the winner of the New Letters Poetry
Prize, the Robert Fraser Poetry Prize, the 2009 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, Philadelphia prize and the A
Room of Her Own CNF prize and publication in The Los Angeles Review. Her first book, Big Silences in a
Year of Rain (Main Street Rag, 2010), was a finalist for the Alice James Books Beatrice Hawley Poetry Prize,
and her chapbook When You Become Snow (Finishing Line Press, 2011) was a semifinalist (under a different
title) for the Black Lawrence Review Poetry Prize 2008. Her work has been published in numerous literary journals
including South Carolina Review, South Dakota Review, Quiddity, Cimarron Review,
Poet Lore, Lullwater, and Many Mountains Moving. She holds an MFA in poetry from Vermont
College and a PhD in psychology. She has a private practice in Mindfulness-Based Psychology.
Daily he told me I was beautiful,
my breast cupped in his palm cured
me of any doubt. So you see why
I cannot gaze at my own nakedness.
Mirrors tell you nothing about love.
The tilted fir outside my window
stands taller than our house. Even if
I described each tuft, counted
branches, became its mirror,
you could never love it as I do,
understand how it kept me faithful,
stood watch with me when the other tree fell.