I leave you my lonely
majesty of want. Those small
rooms that breathed
us. The way we touched each other’s
small squares of soil and greed. Let me
unravel like the slow steps of the child
we never conceived. I leave you
this stubborn bloom of hunger,
his first lighthouse, how he watched
the giant’s dizzy eye throw fistfuls
of light. I leave you a juicy Cabernet,
a jar of turned cherries, the damp leaves
on the first day of learning. October
like a thank you note in the back
of the book. I leave you the fading hazel
of my mother’s gaze. Time tightens
her belt on us all: the mountains lie
down their glass puddles. I leave you
an alphabet. Named each letter
for the way you tasted:
campfire and beachbreak.
Scatter me in the salt
of Big Sur. In the drop
and courtesy of every seaside
bluff.
–
Kelly Grace Thomas is a poet, writer, educator, and ocean-obsessed Aries. The author of Boat Burned (YesYes Books), Kelly is the winner of the Jane Underwood Poetry Prize and Neil Postman Award for Metaphor. Her poems have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Best New Poets, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere.