End-to-End
With the room lit in midday light
and your basket of thread settled
just right, near your fuchsia
painted toes, the bright, haloed
white over your patient eyes
black lashes fanning up and down
like long spinnerets winnowing
Shalimar across your cheek,
we’d sit side by side on that gold
settee, you threading silk through
needles, basting hems together
again, and again, soft as healing
prayers over a rosary while
you looped each stitch round
and about in repetitive order, blessing
our clothes with a kind of curing
through the darning of holes,
repairing of pockets, as if mending
edges could hold all wishes
through each day's wear. Now
you’re not here and my knees
poke through these fraying seams
while I bow to prayer, though I try
to remember, how end-to-end
things always break from too
much weight. This is the way
of an open wound; what dying
brings; unavoidable fate.
Unrequited Notes
I’d like all the answers to conundrums
of my life to be spoken through opened
blooms of the pink camellia tree outside
the kitchen door, so on my way to feeding
sparrows I might hear tiny whispers of truth
revealed in incremental amounts.
Who is the man with the cigar
and the tan fedora outside our window?
I can’t forget the way you carried me
into the bedroom for fear he might
break in. I have napkins folded
inside a jewelry box with horses drawn
in pencil, your name in black marker
beside their mane, untamed magic
whirling on a doily. How many bottles
of barbiturates makes a perfect suicide?
Why are you alive in my dreams?
I found your diary in my nightstand
drawer, tucked beneath an old watch
you wore, tattered, but still
ticking.
Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas is a six-time Pushcart nominee, Best of the Net nominee and the 2012 winner of the Red Ochre Press Chapbook contest. She has authored several collections of poetry including her latest collected works, Hasty Notes in No Particular Order. Her poems have appeared in a wide variety of online and print magazines including: The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine, War, Literature and the Arts; The Department of English at the U.S. Air Force Academy, Able Muse, Poets and Artists, and many more. According to family lore she is a direct descendent of Robert Louis Stevenson. www.clgrellaspoetry.com