Poetry
Dusk Elegy with Myrtle
By Joshua Gregory
I pray down in the green.
I lean down
next to my grandmother,
gone.
*
Myrtle petal’s purple stain/
on the driveway, running /
summer rain . . .
*
When I was a child my first word was bat.
*
Bright wind. Sinew-rush. Shoulder
blade. Black
scythe rustling
the dark green
grass.
Her crinkled, silent wrists
tic.
*
(You washed my skin with soap, you kissed my blood,
you had my mother.)
*
Above us the bats carry her clothes away
in their claws.
She hangs from the branches
a terracotta bird.
Joshua Gregory, MDiv ’19, recently served as the interim associate minister at Old Cambridge Baptist Church in Cambridge and currently works as a hospital chaplain at Beverly Hospital in Beverly, MA. His writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in the Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Painted Bride Quarterly, Pilgrimage, and elsewhere.
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