Requiem for a Childhood Home / Braille Image by Laura Stringfellow

Requiem for a Childhood Home

House on a hill of thorns, columns of ash.
Inside, a carpet of crushed roses
attempts its blossoming. The back
yard is sharp with hair of palmetto,
brittle from the sun. Thistles

slide along the edge of the house,
brackish with grief. There are splinters
in the yard, I believe, which assemble
themselves into bones, even as shadows
disappear and the land

darkens. It’s all a dream
under which the cloud of reason
is shaken, broken to bits. Shattered—
like a mirror that tries too hard to see.

A woman strokes the remnants
of a dismembered photograph, the roots
of my mother's hand disheveling time,
alchemies of earth grown rough by wind.


* Previously published in the Summer 2021 Issue of Déraciné

Braille Image

I am my sad dream walking
the blind. Their hands and arms
vanish. At dawn, they disappear
down the dark road, scattering
mud from tattered shoes.

The blind belong to the roses
and the fields
which, cruelly, they cannot see.

In my waking, they think
nightmares. Without feet,
without maps, the eyes
of the swirling invisible storms
of their fingertips do see.

With our hands, we only touch.

Nightly, I dream for them
these blooming things--
the opening red anemones of hearts,
burgundy buds of tongues into roses,
rising continents of azaleas in spring.

Laura Stringfellow writes both verse and prose poetry, holds an MFA in Creative Writing, Poetry, and hails from the muggy strangelands of the Southern U.S. Her work has appeared in various literary journals and magazines, including Déraciné, FERAL, Right Hand Pointing, and Coffin Bell: a journal of dark literature.