I’m writing life again

by AJ Wright

My grandmother dies
on the solstice, window
scrimshawed with frost.

I don’t know what to make
of the long night, the waxing
crescent climbing the hills
across the river,

the homespun cosmology
of the neighbor’s turtle-shell
windchimes,

don’t know what to do
with the memory of the day
she taught me the meaning
of hell,

pinned it to the map
with a well-used
thumbtack.

I pace the crystal shop
when she’s wheeled
into hospice,

present the family
with a velvet pouch
of expensive rocks:

lavender mica
of peace, tourmaline
black as ballast coal.

Three hundred miles
from home I work
an origami fortune teller

folded through the wild years
of my new life,

and I give it to the creek
on the night of the call:

life capsized at the foot
of a foamy cataract.

Pick a color. Pick
a color.

I feed my schoolyard scrawl
into a camp stove parked
in the mud.

I choose butane blue.

---

AJ Wright is a poet from Appalachia whose work appears or is forthcoming in SWING, APARTMENT Poetry, Hole in the Head Review, Antiphony Journal, The Garlic Press, Good River Review, Eleventh Hour Literary, and elsewhere. She runs Pictura Journal, and her first collection will be published by Pulley Press in 2026.