Carol Stewart
The flame from your scented candle
darkens my wall, rose looks rotten,
ice-blue screams electric. Bowie’s sound,
my vision, spears the atmosphere
yellow as that frazzled marshmallow
stuck to the base of the microwave
and it sure turns to shit when seen through
violet gin and the ice that you brought me
yesterday, recalling what I said
that pink was so last summer.
That one day bridge between us
sees us locking horns on what I swear
is a pagan festival. You tell me
it’s a rope bridge, bring shears,
go take to the hills, go picnic
in the cemetery, there’s nothing
to graze on here, and you’re right,
we’ve trampled those planks long
and hard enough to know
how they shake and splinter
down to where the water feeds the earth
and where our grit lands to blacken it
like a headstone.
And yet it’s a stone that we share,
one we frequently use as a mirror,
our hair silver-streaked with each other’s
obstinate epitaph.
GOAT, we persuade ourselves,
really does stand for
The Greatest of All Time.
we never did do church on Sunday.
***
Carol Stewart is a mother and grandmother living in the Scottish Borders. Currently working on editing her first two interlinked novels, her poems have been published in a number of journals including Abstract Contemporary Expressions, That (Literary Review), Gravitas, Panoply, Coffin Bell, Change Seven, Book Smuggler’s Den, Atlas and Alice and Wingless Dreamer.