The door closed at the end of the hallway.
Drapes obscuring July’s afternoon, shrieking
children muffled from a lightless daze.
Peeking around the corner to see
a tail wagging beside the living grave.
Friday. Saturday. Sunday.
Mondays: on clouds.
Jarring park lights wash over favoring
coaches, ridiculing inconsistency yet refusing
to speak.
Returning for that door to be creaked.
Waiting in garage cluttered sympathy-
Her deepened eyes and glossed
over gaze, sweetly inquiring
“How was the game?”
Habitually cursed to trudge
upstairs, towards that place.
At the end of the hallway, frequenting a sanctuary
immortalizing prior years…
The good ones:
when summer sang bumblebee
fears and stingers catch
on feet;
echoing the person she’ll never
be-
in movement and speech, health and
peace.
Smile, quite bleak, despite childrens’
fairy-dust blowing against
her cheek.
Why can’t we be there?
Trapped in a dugout
instead of the living grave,
on your own.
A mound etched into my
blood,
crushing for someone
she’ll never again see…
Dirt is much softer there,
she tells me.
Lelaina Kelekian is a current undergraduate student with a Writing-Intensive English major, Communications and Medieval Studies minors.
Kelekian says about the piece: “Both [‘Ritual of the Alive?’ and ‘Consolation’] are born from observation, instilled through necessity. A need for completion in knowingly fleeting moments, but nicking yourself on the sharpest end of a puzzle piece; Dullness never being guaranteed. They can live on here: words imitating nostalgia’s bittersweet truth.”
“Branch of the Seine near Giverny”, Claude Monet (1897)