Brookie
Rachel Caruso-Bryant

She hated her varicose veins
my grandfather tells me.
But she never hated her husband –
good Catholic girls never do.
But she couldn’t forgive him.
That much even I remember.
The separate beds,
the separate hands,
not once intertwined in my memories.
But so much gold
on her small frame –
4’11 with a hat.
He wanted to be forgiven.
And maybe he was.
She was a good Catholic girl after all.
All I know is
that when he went deaf,
hers was the only voice
he could hear.

About the Author: Rachel Caruso-Bryant is from Florida and is now an English language lecturer at a university in Saudi Arabia. She lives with her husband and cats and travels the world whenever she gets the chance. When she is not busy thinking about writing, she enjoys writing about cultural identities and displacement, her experiences abroad, and what it means to be a woman of the world. She misses the smell and sound of rain storms terribly. Her poems have appeared in the Red Eft Review, The Stark Poetry Journal, Love and Ensuing Madness, The Skinny Poetry Journal, A Lonely Riot, and more.

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