Step into the bath, she insists. Let your tangled hair stream around you …
With both joy and a tinge of melancholy, BROAD STREET presents the final installment of Marylen Grigas’s poetic series about illness, art, and hope, illustrated by Riley McAlpine-Barthold. We’ve loved these poems; we hope you have too.
Click on the poem above for a printer-ready broadside, or scroll past the bios for simple text. And …
Float.
Marylen Grigas was the author of the poetry collection Shift, out this fall from Nature’s Face publishers. Her poems have recently been published in The New Yorker, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Circulo de Poesia. She lived in Vermont and worked at an architectural stained glass studio. Read about her inspiration for this series by clicking on her Truth Teller Spotlight.
Notes From a Capricious Correspondent
Through half-shut blinds above the filling tub,
morning illuminates vapors of steam:
a fantasia of gold-leafed lemons
bright and sudden as coins
pulled from a magician’s sleeve,
a mere mixture of water and dust.
Next a burlesque—sheerest silk veils shimmy
across my sulky, mirrored face
when, by subtle indirection,
another beam gathers its soulful skirts and rolls
in the roundness of the porcelain sink,
as if being handwashed and gently squeezed
by some invisible Nereid. Step into the bath, she insists.
Let your tangled hair stream around you.
Float.
