Years evaporated like water. 
First, walls stop their weeping, 
curtains get the message, then tables 
and chairs, but water faucets continue 

their soggy testimony. Woman continues 
her reach for tissues, then another 
and so on. When spring arrives, summer, 
windows open for breath. 

Her cries hang in the air. 
Winter sets in, everyone breathes 
a sigh of relief. Her crying is contained within. 
Everyone, every thing, has grown bored 

with her unending grief. Oh, it is true enough, 
her daughter had been beautiful and talented, 
in the prime of her life but gone is gone. 
The living get on with it, buck up. 

In the woman’s head, she hears 
her daughter’s voice, how a melody plays 
itself out until the woman is sure her daughter 
has returned. The faucets can hear the song too, 

they are believers. And so it goes on like this 
for years, the woman returns to the bathroom 
with its locking door, running water, 
faucets that understand, and everyone else 

gets on with the business of living, 
everyone that is, but the woman, where 
to this day she locks the door and waits 
for a scrap of music from far away. 

Poet’s Note

How can I make it new to the reader, grief, buried so deeply within the core of a body? We become so accustomed to giving comfort to those who are grieving, and the learned words lay on the tongue so at the ready, but how do we make it mean something at last, when grief follows the days as a black dog at our heels. A friend’s “learned words” at a party years after the accident that caused my daughter’s death festered to boiling. I had to retreat to a bathroom, run water, muffle the sobs that welled up from a place in me I hadn’t known existed until that moment. There, I listened to laughter among the guests, music in the background. There were flowers, even in that tiny powder room as in the rest of that house, a moment in time where friends gathered for pleasure after a pandemic and isolation, yet my daughter’s life had become a paint brush of color, now faded to the edge of what remained.

—Poet’s Note was published in slightly different form in Gyroscope Review (5 April 2023).

Stellasue Lee

sees poems in emerging images poured in concrete, in grass growing. It all becomes poem worthy. She was a founding editor of Rattle, a poetry journal, and is now Editor Emerita. Two of her books have been entrants for the Pulitzer Prize: Firecracker Red and Crossing The Double Yellow Line. Her most recent collection is Queen of Jacks: new and selected poems (Bombshelter Press, 2019).

Her work has appeared in three additional volumes: After I Fall, a collection of four Los Angeles poets; Over To You, an exchange of poems with David Widup; and 13 Los Angeles Poets, the ONTHEBUS Poets Series Number One (Bombshelter Press). Her work has also been published in numerous literary journals, including Paterson Review, Connecticut Review, Margie, and The American Poetry Review.

Dr. Lee received her Ph.D. from Honolulu University and works privately with students all over the U.S. who are dedicated to learning how to write. In 2013, she won the grand prize Poetry to Aid from Humanity Al Falah in Malaysia. She wants you to know she was born in the year of the dragon.

Author’s website: https://www.stellasuelee.com/

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡Lying in a Darkened Room at Night Letting the Past Live Through Me, poem by Stellasue Lee in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 12, March 2022)

⚡Two Poems by Stellasue Lee in Verse-Virtual (February 2022): “All Saint’s Day” and “Broken Worlds”

⚡A Ferocity of Mind Lives Here in Silence, poem in MacQ (Issue 6, January 2021)