Of You, Just Because
She used to push a light around my heart
igniting words that later found a place
and made their way beyond a secret part
of me that lived within a hidden space,
as if she’d freed me from the looming dark,
and yet I doubt she ever knew the weight
she’d lifted. Name it love, her spark
of magic passing through to me, a fate
I’m grateful for each day. I’d like to write
a verse, intricate, yet understood—
a dedication beautiful as night
with gentle love so infinite and good.
Sometimes a life is graced with such a friend—
with faith, she’ll know me from this poem penned.
This selection comes from the book, Alice in Ruby Slippers, available from Kelsay Books. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Ada Rivera.
Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas is currently enrolled in the Vermont College of Fine Arts, MFA in Writing program. She is a ten-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a seven-time Best of the Net nominee. In 2012 she won the Red Ochre Chapbook Contest, with her manuscript, Before I Go to Sleep. In 2018 her book In the Making of Goodbyes was nominated for The CLMP Firecracker Award in Poetry, and her poem A Mall in California took 2nd place for the Jack Kerouac Poetry Prize. In 2019 her chapbook An Ode to Hope in the Midst of Pandemonium was a finalist in the Eric Hoffer Book Awards. Her work is widely published in magazines and online including, The Yale Journal of Humanities in Medicine, Mezzo Cammin, and Verse Daily. She is a former Editor-in-Chief for the Tule Review and The Orchards Poetry Journal and member of the Sacramento Poetry Center Board of Directors. According to family lore, she is a direct descendant of Robert Louis Stevenson.
Nilsa Ada Rivera writes about gender and diversity issues. She’s the Managing Editor of The Wardrobe for Sundress Publications. She’s an MFA candidate at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work appeared in the Huffington Post, 50 GS Magazine, Six Hens Literary Journal, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, and Selkie Literary Magazine. She lives in Riverview, Florida with her multi-species family.
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