Dear friends 🍂 🍁 🪶
I hope you’re as safe & well as you can be. :)
I wrote this poem last winter, and since then, it’s taken on a very different life...
I suppose the poem waited for the life experience that allowed me to revise & tighten it, though devastating. This is a true story, and I’ve included 3 rounds of edits below, leaning on different memories & details than I initially thought of in draft one. I’m not confident it’s finished, but I hope this post speaks to you in some way, particularly the changes between drafts.
Thank you so much, as always. Please take care of yourselves (as well as you’re able). ❤️🩹
With care & gratitude,
Mik
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
In a few months, when her house is gone, and it snows on the new road, I’ll think of the woman Grandma hand-painted on the foundation. I’ve caught her now, still in her late twenties, on pale blue tiles. As a child, I watched her, always smiling with her arms above her head in a gentle dance, propping up the century-old red brick. “The woman is still holding up the house,” I declared to a smile and nod as Grandma shook my sand-stained snowsuit out the laundry room window. Every winter, of course, we dug the woman out. When the snow accumulates like the laundry fluff I was taught to remove from the dryer to prevent a fire, I won’t know if the woman’s palms balance the left passing lane the way they hold up the kitchen floor. The cold will catch her throat first; the driveway is already a charcoal ocean frozen at her hips. She was drawn tired, I know. But she’s never been beneath anything alone.
A new dispatch, from St. John’s, Newfoundland.
The next installment of my fairytales-in-verse series: “The Little Mermaid” - Part 7.
For the one-and-only, wonderful Conscious Writers Collective, I write previews for our upcoming guest speakers! Take a peek here.
Full archive here ❤️🔥
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