Ellen Rowland
Ellen Rowland creates, concocts and forages when she’s not writing or leading poetry workshops. She is the author of three collections of haiku: Light, Come Gather Me, Blue Seasons and The Echo of Silence, a bi-lingual collaboration. Her full length poetry collection, No Small Thing, was published by Fernwood Press in 2023. You can find her writing in One Art, Braided Way, Silver Birch Press, Rock.Paper.Poem and several anthologies, including “The Path to Kindness” and “The Wonder of Small Things” edited by James Crews. She lives off the grid with her family on a small farm in Greec
Lacrimal Gland
Sometimes, when I’m lying on my side
reading poetry in bed, I feel a single tear
leave the corner of my eye and slide down
my cheek onto the pillow. Because there is
no obvious emotion attached to the tear,
I used to think it was merely a sign of fatigue
or eye strain, a plea to close the book and sleep.
But more and more, I wonder if this isn’t a wholly
human reaction to someone who has chiseled
diamonds with a pen, wrapped their hard story
in rosemary and lavender, performed open-heart
surgery, handed you the heart still beating and said,
Here, take it. It’s yours.
Trespass
I spy a red ripe fig on the neighbor’s tree, the biggest one, a breast of a fig,
its soft flesh giving in as I grab hold on tiptoes to pick from its sticky stem.
I take its brethren too, a fig constellation, a halo of summer’s heat and wasp
worship, and cradle them in the hem of my shirt pulled up to sling the forbidden
fruit and conceal my theft. I walk them home quickly, splay them on the table,
dollop yogurt into a bowl, tear one apart and drizzle it all with pine honey,
the resin of that fine spindly trunk thickly coating the parfait. Dig the spoon in,
not a delicate coffee spoon, a soup spoon to scoop up this bliss. Allow it
to sit on my tongue like a lap dance teasing, then bite down and swirl
my tongue around the tart, the sweet, the cream, the tang, the million seeds
waking ancestors of fig lovers in my DNA, the memory of taste reaching
all the way back to Eve. What is better than this? I wonder, as she confesses
in a whisper “It wasn’t an apple after all.”
