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 MobiusFictionColumbia Journal, Poetry NorthwestSierra 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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