Juliana Gray
Juliana Gray’s third poetry collection is Honeymoon Palsy (Measure Press 2017). Recent poems have appeared in Willow Springs, storySouth, West Trestle Review, and elsewhere. An Alabama native, she lives in western New York and teaches at Alfred University.
Ode to Random Bruises
Spots of red, violet, blue, the precise
yellow-green of broody goldfinches,
you bloom on my thighs and kneecaps overnight.
Bright signifiers, like passages
my students highlight without understanding,
you remind me not of pain itself,
but that pain happens every day, casual
contusions dealt while pouring a mug of tea,
making the bed, groping toward the bathroom
in the dark. Already we are dying
without a scar, or even a memory.
Little flowers, already you are fading.
The Gaslight District
Lots of cities have a Gaslight District.
That’s not a joke. I lived in the Gaslight District
in Cincinnati for four years, in an attic
where my husband locked me up. Okay,
that’s a joke. Actually, it’s lovely,
a neighborhood of 19th century mansions
built by wealthy citizens looking
to escape the crowds and disease of downtown.
The iron gaslights flicker prettily,
and husbands tell their wives there is no flicker.
They go to Reds games, eat at Skyline, bowls
of watery meat sauce over spaghetti,
which the city insists is actually chili.
My husband read my poetry and said,
gently, that I should be a food writer.
I felt so miserable, so trapped, I might
have gone a little crazy. All the women
in the Gaslight District are crazy, according to
their partners, who swear the women never mentioned
that appointment, who promise they deleted
their old flame’s number, who insist
that actually, they do listen, they’re listening
now, as they stuff their mouths with beef
and cinnamon noodles, claiming it tastes like fire.
Elegy for Blue
Goodbye to cardigans, cobalt cashmere,
turtlenecks, an ark of navy socks.
Goodbye to sapphire cocktail rings, azure
pendant sets stuffed in a jewelry box.
Goodbye to powdery nursing home sheets
and gaping hospital gowns. My mother’s closed
her once-blue eyes, now colorless as sleet.
Hospice folds her veiny hands in repose.
Her lifelong favorite color was blue, and so
I never wore it, favoring the green
that she detested. Now that she’s finally died,
all her things are packed and bagged to go.
I’ll never be troubled by that color again
unless I raise my face up to the sky.
