Emalisa Rose

Featured Contributor ~ Poetry

When not writing poems, Emalisa Rose enjoys crafting. She walks with a birding group through the neighborhood trails. She volunteers in animal rescue. Her latest collection is “This water paint life, published by Origami Poems Project.

The ivy that clings

The strength of the sycamore
refuses to yield to the ivy
that threatens her sovereignty.

I moved round our checkerboard
countering clockwise, of your claim
on my psyche.

Ten stepping stones forward; four
lay forgotten.

The sycamore’s silence embraces
the winds, as they chime through
her hollowness and

perhaps I’ll get over our breakup
one day.

First, come the snowmen

From her hospital window,
she’s watched that same tree
as she ails with disease.

Bare branches, battered;
Winter’s been wicked, this year.

They say Ann wlll pass
in the next several weeks.
Spring will be glorious, but
sister, dear sister, we haven’t
made snowmen yet.

I’m in no rush for leaves.

What I wish I’d told you

Having feared repercussions,
I never told you “that,” though
always on the tip of tongue.

Today it rains, in heavy hues,
concurrent with this day they
bury you.

With deep regret, I watch the clouds
converse, in downpour’s truth, the
loss of you and what I wish I’d told
you, all those years ago.

Only her

The scars on my knee, the shame
that I felt when my dad was
arrested, the bra I was stuffing.

She knew all my quirks, the blur of
my lines, how the dots reconnected,
and where skies met the sea, on my
latitude’s longitude.

And I wish I could talk to her; from that
scary, but magical place, where no one
but her, would be welcome to visit.