Sally Albiso
Sally Albiso earned a BA in Spanish from UCLA and an MA in English with a creative writing emphasis from San Diego State University. While at SDSU, she studied with the poets Glover Davis and Carolyn Forché and completed a thesis of her own poetry.
After receiving her master’s degree, she taught English composition, creative writing, and English as a Second Language at Chapman College, San Diego State University Extension, and Southwestern College.
In 2003, Albiso and her husband moved from California to the North Olympic Peninsula of Washington State, where she returned to writing poetry.
She has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and received the Jeanne Lohmann Poetry Prize, The Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award, the Robert Frost Foundation Poetry Award, and the Camber Press Chapbook Award for her chapbook Newsworthy. Two other chapbooks, The Notion of Wings and The Fire Eater and the Bearded Lady, were published by Finishing Line Press in 2015 and 2016. Her poems have appeared in Blood Orange Review, Common Ground Review, Crab Creek Review, Floating Bridge Review, Poetica, Pontoon: an anthology of Washington State poets, Rattle, The Comstock Review , and other publications.
Sally's poem "Wildfire" from Moonless Grief was featured on Verse Daily
Read more of Sally's poetry online, featured at BoomerLit Mag.
Sally passed away in 2019, with her loving husband John by her side.
LIght Entering My Bones: $16.00
Poem from Light Entering My Bones
Birthday Card
We’re now the same age, your spine collapsing while my hips weaken. So much brittle in us, we could splinter like glass and shine among rocks until someone collects our shards, pale as fog among the amber of broken bottles. We could be swallowed by gulls and taken to sea in their crops, still sharp enough to slice or tumbled to a milky finish like eyes veiled by cataracts. We could stoop beneath the weight of years, forced to turn our heads to see peripherally, call to each other in the voices of prophets and predict what our bones will do next. I enclose a gift of powdered marrow. Put it in tea to thicken against fracturing. When you visit, we’ll walk the beach and look for ourselves among the shattered.
Poem from Moonless Grief
When You Visit
firs dim against a drifting sky, crows beat west eclipsing the horizon. A hush sifts down the hall. Night fills the breaches between trees, a lunar crescent ascending like an illustration in the stories you read me, earth listing. The next morning fog lifts like a memory slowly unveiling. Blue herons stalk the shore stabbing at water as if it were flesh through which flesh is pulled delivered into light from a fluid darkness. Kingfishers kite with a nervous energy like yours. I ask if you remember dancing with abandon spinning me into shadow then sun, our faces transparent as the eggs I incubated for school waiting for cracks to appear. Each stumbling chick we placed into a cushioned box later found dead, necks broken when they tried to escape their cardboard nest. How we knew even then we couldn’t save each other.