Three Poems by Rozalija Grace
Image by Alberto Vivas
Glaciers
—for Elizabeth Rose Shaffer
My soul is heavy with glaciers.
Every land that birthed me
once lay below
the ice and rose again
at geologic pace.
It leaves me speechless, tongue
depressed.
I think, sometimes,
of all the words I’ve forgotten
from all the tongues that have been
in my mouth. They will not rise
again.
It is quiet where ice-
stripped dirt springs
back toward lichen spores
and sun—wordless there
where dandelions
settle over ancient fires
that roots will never reach.
Ten thousand generations
passed from the earth with nothing
to mark them, no trace
on the wind.
“Someone will remember
us,” Sappho wrote,
“even in another time.”
A fragment of a work that is lost.
You will read this, shterndl,
and maybe no one again.
Stars will blow out
in every sky I was born
beneath.
In another time,
no one will remember our words,
this scoured land, our English
speech.
Our names will seep
away, farther than the roots
of dandelions reach—
farther than the taps of figs.
In that time, beneath
a low branch, a woman
with a hand like mine will clasp
a woman with a hip like yours . . .
share a bite from a fruit
you and I have never
named . . . steal a dribble
from a laughing chin.
She
will not think of us, but—
when they kiss—she’ll remember
the one tongue I can’t
forget.
For My Fiancée, the Great American Novelist, after the Murder of Renee Good
—for Elizabeth Rose Shaffer,
after Olavo Bilac’s “Língua portuguesa”
Last flower of America, wild and beautiful,
all the flowers have gone to petal your bed
like a grave. You know that you are riding somewhere;
the last time we fucked, you wore cowgirl boots.
I scowl over newspapers in French, tell you
how much I miss Montréal. You ask
if there are diners there. You won’t go
anywhere that doesn’t have a diner.
You love road trips, comic books,
apple pie. Sometimes I think I hate
this country only because I was never young.
When you are gone, I will miss America—the promise
of great things, your voice in the living
room . . . “Give me coffee! I’m going to write!”
Hagiography
—for Elizabeth Rose Shaffer
The morning after
the storm, the horizon
is gleaming steel
whetstoned on retreating
clouds, and I
can see the future—
how dawn will break
when they’ve cleaned
my final razor.
On that morning,
the sky will be full
of birds, and I
one of them—a form
more like myself
than the one they wished
to give me—a black
absence, an anvil
held over from a cloud.
Raven, rook,
or crow could suit me
—creatures that remember
their own—but,
if God remembers me,
let her trace my breast
and the tips of my wings
in white. Let her
call the nuns
in their habits to strew
grain for birds
at the end of winter
and hold me on their fingers,
as once I perched
on yours. Let them
marvel and admire—
tell stories, then,
as women do,
of the creatures of the forest
and the doings of saints
—how the magpie searches
all that shines
for its missing ring
because once you called it
your angel, gave it
its wings and your name.
Rozalija Grace is a Russian-Canadian writer with roots in Alaska and Quebec. Her poetry, short stories, and essays have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and featured in Room, Rust & Moth, So to Speak, and other periodicals. Her translations of early Soviet literature have been nominated for Best Literary Translations. She currently serves as a poetry editor for Psaltery & Lyre and lives in Minneapolis with her novelist fiancée, arguing over which of them is the better writer. (It’s her fiancée.) You can read more at her website and on her Bluesky @rozalijagrace.com.