Mara Lee Grayson
Image by Eduardo Garcia-Nieto on Unsplash
Mara Lee Grayson is a poet and a race rhetorics scholar. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Mobius, Fiction, Columbia Journal, Poetry Northwest, Sierra Nevada Review, and other publications. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Slippery Elm Poetry Prize. She is the author of the books Teaching Racial Literacy: Reflective Practices for Critical Writing and Race Talk in the Age of the Trigger Warning: Recognizing and Challenging Classroom Cultures of Silence. Grayson holds an MFA from The City College of New York and a PhD from Columbia University and is an assistant professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills. Website: maragrayson.com. Twitter: @maraleegrayson.
Missing Barcelona on Christmas Day in Southern California
At the Plaça Reial,
before we went
to the tattoo parlor,
I asked for four daisies
and a switchblade
and got one
of the five, though not
the one I expected.
I would have
asked for more
but the tide was coming in
and your shirt was missing
a button:
practicality is a mother
with no teeth.
We ate sandwiches
that tasted like the sea
while tumbleweeds
cartwheeled
away from us
in another landscape, too
far from here
to fit in this poem.
Isn’t this what you wanted,
you asked, swallowing
the punctuation –
I wanted:
the water, the mannequin
skin of a cactus tree,
the hills of La Floresta, and
a Catalan tongue.
I didn’t mention your mosaic
smile or the freckle
sun stained
on your shoulder.
We crumpled
our napkins and watched the oil
derrick churn.
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