The Literary Review
Fuzzy Gray Thing
Hope is the thing with feathers
Emily Dickinson
If hope is the thing with feathers,
perhaps sadness is the fuzzy gray thing
brushing against my legs,
under the table,
crossing the threshold.
I thought it was the cat,
but one day suspected
it was just my sadness
come to visit for a while.
I catch a glimpse of it
now and then
with the corner of my eye.
It nonchalantly
lets me know it’s here,
not frightening, not asking,
just here,
as if
to remind me
of when
you’re not.
I thought my mind was playing tricks on me,
but then you, only you, saw it, too.
And that was when
I knew for sure
that the fuzzy gray thing
was our sadness.
- Diana Conchado
Guilty for the Rain
One can feel guilty for anything,
really.
Guilty for the rain,
for the oxygen we breathe,
for the light that doesn’t change,
for the milk that turns sour.
Your guilt was quiet but not innocent.
I could feel it creep up the stairs,
grab you by the throat,
trip you till you couldn’t stand.
You’d relent in the name of duty,
eldest born,
head on shoulders,
wiser than his years,
the always practical, rational, you.
It thwarted the lover
with his distracted violin,
author of dictionaries,
teacher of utopias,
the little boy who walked in his sleep.
“El enfermo”, she called you
over and over
thirty years later.
Those words left wounds deeper
than the scalpels that tore through your
withered leg.
How they resounded in every
thump
of your limp
on the pavement.
So many lives later,
your guilt comes to taunt me
in her motionless orbit,
graceless neglect strangling
my first and last love.
Contagious, corrosive, it nests in me
until now, I too, am a cripple of guilt
for you,
for her,
for the rain.
- Diana Conchado