by Millicent Borges Accardi
You don’t feel all
right because the moon
which you have set into lace
comes on strong like
it‘s all the same.
When the blue turns to grey,
the thoughts open up
as if they were an easy
conversation to have
as if you were making coffee
and washing dishes as if everything
were fine instead, you find
yourself stepping backward
into the lie, the downpour of
dark meanness, the new
new next to the old new and
what your therapist loves to call
the new normal, or how to be mindful
with that false reassurance that time
will be all right because that is what
people say when they are afraid
and distancing back into a past near
circling place where they do not want to
ask questions or leave away from,
a place where no one is hurt and voices
are never raised into the blue and out of
the grey, where your mind is moving
forward Is this what a little bit
of what we wanted now when we never knew
when means? Is that how to make sense?
How to sort through a life lesson
the right way instead of waiting for an OK
acceptance, permission to be sure
and positive and kind. Yeah kind like when
before the wars started and you didn’t know
it was less than what you wanted, the blue
and grey the soldiers’ colors and colors of eyes,
the sky before the red doubts gathered and darken,
the rain filling up with rain. As you try to speak.
Millicent Borges Accardi, a Portuguese-American writer, is the author of four poetry collections, including Quarantine Highway (FlowerSong Press) and Only More So (Salmon). Among her awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Fulbright, CantoMundo, Creative Capacity, California Arts Council, Foundation for Contemporary Arts (Covid grant), Fundação Luso-Americana (Portugal), and Barbara Deming Foundation. she lives in Topanga canyon and curates two poetry series. She’s a 2024 mentor for Adroit and AWP Writer 2 Writer summer programs.
Emerge Literary Journal 