If you’d have called my name I might have known
before you saw a breadth of sky, then flown
above the neighbor’s house, the gust below
your wings, I might have lassoed feathers slow
between my hands, because an impulse took
you there, I never had the chance to look
at you and say, come back old bird. Dear god!
I prayed inside my head. What sweet façade
replaced your perch, a slant of tile sable?
Hapless being, while flaunting on the gable
then waning far from view. You’d carried through
I’d thought, some reverie adorned in blue −
but you had burned, outstretched atop their roof
they brought you home, in case I needed proof.
Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas is a six-time Pushcart nominee and Best of the Net nominee. She is the recent winner of the RED OCHRE PRESS Chapbook Competition with her entry Before I Go to Sleep. She has authored six chapbooks and two e-chapbooks along with her latest full-length collection of poems: Epistemology of an Odd Girl, newly released from March Street Press. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of online and print magazines including: The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine, Able Muse, Poets and Artists, Foliate Oak and many more. According to family lore she is a direct descendent of Robert Louis Stevenson. Visit her website: http://www.clgrellaspoetry.com.
Eunoia Review 