… there are, on this planet alone, something like two
million naturally occurring sweet things …
Ross Gay, “Sorrow Is Not My Name”
Sometime during our year of lockdown
I stopped dancing, those graceful graceless
steps across the living room at night
on fuzzy slippered toes for an audience of one
until the world had become so small
I could no longer spread my arms and spin.
Surrounded by fog and smoke, I forgot
the two million sweet things: vanilla ice cream bars
encased in dark chocolate melting onto my hand,
how sipping a late cappuccino from that orange cup
brings me back to a trip where we ate squash blossoms
at breakfast, coffee cherry buns hot from a wood oven,
stopping at roadside stands to eat fresh papaya,
walking through the water to that secret alcove
in front of the boarded hotel we joked about
refurbishing for ourselves, the relief of coming home.
My friend showing up one day
with a hand-crafted writing desk just because,
watching the girl down the street grow into herself,
the toddler who insists on playing in our rocks,
grabbing them up, letting them rain down
knocking on our front window, the joy
of having neighbors, walking out in stockinged
feet to say hello, waking to see the coffee
you’ve placed beside the bed, the weight
of the cat on top of me when I sleep. A video
of my mother’s delight, twirling her napkin
in the air as the waiters hew-hawed her 90th birthday.
Is it wrong to cherish these things when
there’s so much suffering? Or is it worse
to forget and not let the sweet things in?
LeeAnn Pickrell is a poet and freelance editor. Her work has appeared in many journals, including One Art, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Loud Coffee Press, Atlanta Review, Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, Eclectica, and in the anthologies Coffee Poems: Reflections on Life with Coffee, Eclectica Magazine Best Poetry, and A Trembling of Finches. Her chapbook Punctuated is forthcoming from Bottlecap and her book Gathering the Pieces of Days is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press. She lives in Northern California.
web: leeannpickrell.com | bluesky: @leeannp.bsky.social | substack: leeannpickrell.substack.com