Alicia Elkort
The Time Ray Reached Across the Table for the Potatoes and His Mother Sliced Him with a Steak Knife
Reaching was impolite, she said.
Sixty years later, we face the wind,
ocean at our feet, & I want to rise
above foam-crusted spray, a black-finned
whale, a cormorant cresting grey waves,
dissolve to ether, travel myself
back to Ray’s mother’s oak table
where I’d hand the eight-year-old
a bowl of potatoes slathered in butter
and salt. I’d offer soup with fresh okra
dusted with orange peppers.
There would be strawberries
plucked at the edge of a forest
where the children would have played
all day fashioning bows and arrows
from tree bark and minted sea glass.
As my skirts swooshed into the next room
I’d say, If there's anything more
you’d like, you can grab it off the table--
I know children are hungry.
We walk the bay’s perimeter counting
stars against a darkening sky.
Ray’s corona of white hair lifts with the salted air.
It’s hard for me to love myself.
The Solar Plexus Chakra is Associated
with the color yellow--
rows of aspens, tendered corn silk,
yellow jackets in picnic sweet tea,
street signs, tender buds
of ranunculus, mango, lemon, papaya,
yellow paint beneath
white paint on the neighbor’s fence.
Someone somewhere else
has yellow curtains. The book says
wear yellow to encourage
confidence, happiness, stability.
Yellow spinning,
swirling shrapnel, dizzy yellow
to the knee, to the ground—
the man who raped me
wore a yellow shirt.
--
Alicia Elkort’s poetry has appeared in AGNI, Arsenic Lobster, Black Lawrence Press, Califragile, Georgia Review, Heron Tree, Hunger Journal, Menacing Hedge, Rogue Agent, Stirring: A Literary Collection, Tinderbox Poetry Journal and many others. Alicia's poems have been nominated for the Orisons Anthology (2016) and the Pushcart (2017). She lives in California and will go to great lengths for an honest cup of black tea and a cool breeze.