The Jupiter Review
Dear Cat
Carol Lynn Grellas
Forgive me for dressing you in pain,
pink baby clothes, bonnets tied
and ribbons falling around your perfect
​
Whiskers. The way you’d lay
like a tiny child inside my arms,
was almost too bear— to love a creature
​
like that, to be young enough to not know
you’d die, one paw slipping in the middle
of a rainstorm. The coping of a swimming
​
pool curved just enough to leave your fall
uninterrupted, your silent meow under
the water of a black bottom pool, while
​
I was asleep in the house comforted by
the sound of water in patterned drops
from a sky full of rain. So much can happen
​
when you close your eyes. One minute
a beautiful being is pressed against
your breast, the next, only the hollow
​
of an imprint, where a body used to rest.
•
Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas is currently enrolled in the Vermont College of Fine Arts, MFA in Writing program. She is an eleven-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a seven-time Best of the Net nominee. In 2012 she won the Red Ochre Chapbook Contest, with her manuscript, Before I Go to Sleep. In 2018 her book In the Making of Goodbyes was nominated for The CLMP Firecracker Award in Poetry, and her poem ""A Mall in California"" took 2nd place for the Jack Kerouac Poetry Prize. In 2019 her chapbook An Ode to Hope in the Midst of Pandemonium was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Her latest collection of poems Alice in Ruby Slippers, has recently been featured in Sundress Publication's, The Wardrobes Best Dressed. She has served as the Editor-in-Chief for the Orchards Poetry Journal and Co-Editor-in-Chief for the Tule Review. Her work has been included in the Saratoga Authors Hall of Fame and according to family lore she is a direct descendant of Robert Louis Stevenson.