Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas
Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas is the author of several poetry collections. She is an eleven-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a seven-time Best of the Net nominee. In 2019 her chapbook An Ode to Hope in the Midst of Pandemonium was a finalist in the Eric Hoffer Book Awards, and in 2021 her latest collection of poems Alice in Ruby Slippers, was short-listed for the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize. She has served as the Editor-in-Chief for the Orchards Poetry Journal and Tule Review. Carol Lynn is a recent graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts, MFA in Writing program.
Dear Mother, Now That You’re Gone
I can finally tell you that it was in our backyard
when a neighborhood boy held me against
our old picket fence. He ran his hand down
my underclothes, his thin finger slipping easily
like a snake as it slithers over the heated pavement.
It happened so fast, I pretended I’d imagined it,
an easier way to cope with feeling ashamed
and betrayed at once. There were six of us
that summer. Curious kids spending afternoons
till twilight between dandelions and tangled grasses,
between backyard hedges and storybook houses,
between hopscotch-marked sidewalks and playing
doctor. Your days haunted with sorrow; I was 8,
and you were a newly widowed mother whose
husband had just died by suicide― I escaped
your gaze daily as you coped with your emptiness
while breathing in the darkness of our halved home,
Thinking back, that boy created a memory
that’s never left, a memory of leaving my body
unable to return to whoever I was before his probing
violation, before my father’s passing, before
you were overwhelmed with melancholy before
I knew the hurt of undying grief— the way it burrows
in the name of death, making a grave of the heart.
