Judge’s Choice – Creative Writing – Patient Category
© Caroline Canter Triscik, MA, NCC | Patient
After Ross Gay and Gwendolyn Brooks
It is what
it is.
They say and
say again
and I, too, say
how
can one accept
things as they
are or as
they were?
We cannot
rewrite facts, we can
water them down, maybe,
but for who’s sake? Or
write, not instead,
but beside, the bitter
sorrow a list
of the joy the body
remembers
the tiny plastic figurine
of St. Jude you plucked
from the quarter machine
in LaVillita, the tacos pollo,
queso fresco, icons of Mary
and Joseph painted
on bathroom doors, Vienna
Teng pounding piano keys
in the Pensacola Barnes & Noble,
the newspaper clipping bringing
us to her singing of light through
thinning fog, the mandarin
orange segments peeled apart
in my son’s palm, handed
to me across the black walnut table,
rainbow shadows dancing on walls,
reflected from the refracted
light above the sink, sudsy
cinnamon-scented water
warm on my skin, reverberations
in my arms, my chest, the weight
of mallets in hands as they
beat the skin of the bass drum
under Friday night lights
If I listen closely they pour
out, like water on them all-
the bitter, the sweet-
tender seeds we have
held carefully
in our pockets
for years, decades even, roll
them gently in our unclenched
hands, maybe bury them
again, this time not
to be hidden, but to see
what they become.
I remember. I am violet
after April rain. I am spring.
Judge’s Comments:
A Matryoshka — or Eastern European nesting doll — is what this poem felt like. A poem with a nod to another poem, “Sorrow is Not My Name” by Ross Gay, which itself was a nod to the Gwendolyn Brooks poem “To the Young Who Want to Die.” With rich imagery, the author lists and relishes beautiful memories to counter life’s sorrows.