Bio: Carol Lynn Grellas is a two-time Pushcart nominee and the author of two chapbooks: Litany of Finger Prayers, from Pudding House Press and Object of Desire newly released from Finishing Line Press.  She is widely published in magazines and online journals including most recently, The Smoking Poet, Oak Bend Review and Flutter, with work upcoming in decomP, Thick with Conviction and Poetry Midwest and Best of Boston Literary Magazine. She lives with her husband, five children and a blind dog named Ginger.

 

 

Poetry by Carol Lynn Grellas

 

The Inevitable Life of a Bubble

In the early hours of morning
when the lawn is damp from an angel’s visit
and my windows cry with reflections
of kaleidoscope stars and lost ghosts
searching for home again,

I’m plagued with memories of recent events
that beg for a kind of correction;
yet, there's no way to switch the sun’s position
or turn the earth around when it’s shadowing the moon.

Somehow a rainbow is missing that should've been
between the rain, but never came as promised.
I’ve seen the child holding a pail, trying to catch bubbles
as they filter though the air like butterflies.

This will never be
and no one has the heart to say.

 

Breached

Once, for curiosity’s sake, I slipped
through the jaws of an incessant talker─
like a creature folding its wings,
I prepared for the moving cavity,
made myself small, minimized
shoulders down, as if sliding
through the birth canal; a journey
to the maw of a chatty marionette.

From the start, a colossal mistake
as removal might have proved tricky
but I’d read about bugs being swallowed
whole; eight-legged creepers sliding
down throats of sleeping souls
in the midst of fantastical dreams.

Somehow the mindless babble drew
me in to a network of web-like words;
aimless prattle expelled with spit;
while her mechanical opening increased

diameters minute by minute until
I was reminded of birth and babies
born breech, entering a world in
backwards order; feet first.

Thinking,
how stubborn a child can be, how no
amount of plea undoes the fate
of any willful heart. How high-forceps
are dicey tools but save mothers
from death during delivery, how some
people need heaps of wiggle-room
and catch a buzz from seemingly innocuous
rumors, put their foot in their mouth
limitless times, yet rarely someone else’s.

 

Mislaid

Someone stole a letter from my mother’s grave;
a cursive silver P that I had carefully placed
on the marble marker. Her headstone needed
some fancying up, a shiny doodad to catch the sun’s
light and boomerang rays from Heaven back
and forth again. But just today, while paying
my respects, only the outline remained,
as if they’d stolen a star and not even
the sky could make up the difference.