Before Tomorrow Came In this pandemic, I’m thankful for the chance to say, I love you, because there’s not always tomorrow when the world’s been thrown a curveball. Where’s Superman when you need him? I thought I could do it, you know, save the whole universe, but God must have gotten annoyed with my prayers after a while. Too much to handle, so many problems all at once. It can’t be easy being the one who watches over everyone. I know, just from worrying about my own children, I have hives in several undisclosed places. At least my dermatologist says that what they’re from. An unscientific term she calls motherly unease— All my joy and anxiety has always been from my kids. But now it’s only anxiety about mine and everyone’s kids. Still, each night I set the table and I’m grateful for the home we live in, for the walls that shelter us inside— and for the windows that overlook the garden where we used to walk beneath the gazebo beside the roses all in bloom, where we’d talk about a wedding planned for June, or who’s wearing what this coming year—and as I place a glass to the right of each dinner plate and the Waterford silverware carefully over the double folded napkins, as I position chairs for us who used to sit together and enjoy a meal with banter about the day’s doings— a parking ticket, a college acceptance letter, a broken washing machine, a visit to the Vet, now I’m just grateful to sit together and for memories of what used to be 1963 In the kitchen, I remember my mother handing a glass of Scotch to my dad wearing his favorite green plaid shirt the color of trees—our dog Blackjack and his broken look after being scolded for scarfing down a lump of eggs, I gave him as he waited routinely under the table— where beneath a world of loss rested on the hollow of a hardwood floor. How that floor came to echo voices of the dead and the clang of hanging bells every time another passed. My father reading names in the obituary, the sharp edging of metal that scraped my knees as my weight shifted from one side to the other—the dawn’s light an amber river that streamed in from the half opened window in the empty space of morning Ambient Sometimes, your mouth is an ice cap of arctic gray. When you’re angry I’ve felt the urge slide away— the way a greyhound runs over land, if only I could capture your anger in my arms, but you are a victim of your own trigger and the coldness that lives in your mouth; a freeze I can’t cross no matter how inviting the tongue that often imitates a home or even the heat of one lone burning star. Letters to My Brother Brother, today I sit on the brick bench of the house —Cesar Vallejo Brother today I sit on the brick bench of the house where we grew up and think back to another time when the two of us were young, you younger than me, and the way we’d bicker about everything. Your hands in the pond by the side of the house searching for tiny green frogs, you so much faster than me and how I was only searching for you, my palm upturned and waiting for some sign of closeness between us, but you were only passing time hoping for the next fleeting thing that couldn’t be caught, your fingers dipped beneath the murkiness of water even now, the best place to hide. Brother today I sit at the cemetery where our parents are buried, both of them in the same tomb, father above mother so carefully placed in their ornamental caskets as I watch the sparrows in the nearby olive trees and the squirrels scamper over grass, and I remember the day we walked this boneyard together, our feet sinking into the softness of newly opened ground, how we said things will be different now, how we said, from this day on, we’ll stay in touch the way we always should have, the way our parents would have hoped for, yet here I am, sitting on this bench alone, without you, we’ve not spoken in months, or maybe we have, but I don’t think we said anything worth remembering. Daily Ritual My child’s skin was the taste of apples in the warmth of summer— there’s a way of holding an apple, cradling its preciousness like a baby in your hands, the startling sweetness, of flavor that lingers all day, stays inside my throat. A child isn’t yours when they are grown, yet the feeling of being needed by someone so trusting reminds me of the way I yearn for apples in summer, fearing one day my hands will be empty. About the Author:  Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas is a ten-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a seven-time Best of the Net nominee. In 2012 she won the Red Ochre Chapbook Contest, with her manuscript, Before I Go to Sleep. In 2018 her book In the Making of Goodbyes was nominated for a national book award and her poem A Mall in California took 2nd place for the Jack Kerouac Poetry Prize. In 2019 her chapbook An Ode to Hope in the Midst of Pandemonium was a finalist in the Eric Hoffer Book Awards. In 2020, two of her sonnets were given Honorable Mention in the Soul Making Keats Literary Competition. Her new book Alice in Ruby Slippers is forthcoming from Aldrich Press. She has been the featured poet at countless venues, most recently, Mezzo Cammin and Verses Daily. She is the Co-Editor-in-Chief for the Tule Review and former Editor-in-Chief of The Orchards Poetry Journal and a member of the Sacramento Poetry Center Board of Directors. She is currently enrolled in the Vermont College of Fine Arts, MFA in Writing program. |
