Poetry by Evie Groch

      Tim Vrtiska CC




Cold and Bitter

Tea, beverage of choice for discomfort,
angst, fear, the need for self-care, tenderness.
It sits before me on the kitchen counter to help me 
find the calm in eddies of hate, vitriol swirling down
the drain of human chaos around the globe.

I pray my tepid tea will counteract my dread of viruses
of religious certainty that fosters tyrannical beliefs,
beliefs bathed in certainty the almighty speaks only to 
and through privileged ones, teaches them 
those who differ are condemned to hell. 

My islet of calm is shrinking, my tea cooling.
Bleakness steals bits of relief right out from under me.
Climate is deflating any high spirits I hold.
I swat at the memory of scenes of devastation like
I would at an annoying bug.

I cannot cocoon myself enough,
crack the code for entry into conjuration
where magic might make things right.
Like a rattlesnake in high desert, I still try
to shed my skin of anguish, leave it behind
with flotsam and jetsam in soiled waters.

Until then, if ever, I sit and wait,
struggle to survive, see sanity return.

My tea turns cold and bitter.

​




A Language No One Spoke

She was a winter solstice
whose bleakness spread depression.
She was a melody sung off-key
that couldn’t correct itself.
She was a geyser that faithfully
spewed relentless love.
She was a prison in which
unspeakable and imagined
events took place.
She was a language no one spoke.
She was an enigma on the
outskirts of normal.
She was my mother whom
I learned to love more fiercely
after her death.

​


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Evie Groch’s opinion pieces, humor, poems, short stories, and recipes have been published in the New York Times, The SF Chronicle, The Contra Costa Times, The Journal, Games Magazine, various anthologies and online. Her themes are travel, languages, immigration and justice of which she writes in Half the Hurricanes.