Poetry by Joanna Grant

             ​ Peter Corbett CC



Spanish Moss
for my father

Where we buried you, there by the Sound, the live oaks bent under the weight of their years, Spanish moss draping the gnarled, grey boughs—so much tatty old lace, as I thought at the time, and every frond and tendril a haven for something that stings or bites. A fit enough place for you, or so I thought at the time.

None of that old moss for me—this stone was going to roll, roll, far, far away from here, as far, as fast, as forever.

Now I live on the other side of the world, a desert where hardly anything grows, just date palms, acacia, and memory. As if I could not just see, but could hear, taste, feel—the silvery wavelets lapping the grassy verge by the stone graveyard wall, salt in the air, on my skin, drops gathering, slipping, dripping down my temples, down the knots of my spine.

At random, I read now that the Spanish moss I remember is called sphagnum, its real name I’ve never heard of before, and that, no, its little grey fronds offer no shelter to the ticks or the chiggers that burrow beneath the skin. What else might there be for me to unlearn? 

I reimagine it now, reimagine it all—the waves, the wall, a heron searching the shallows on its spindly greyblue legs, the croaks of bullfrogs in their season, keeping you company, calming your unquiet mind. 

Now, I’ve had long enough to learn. People are what they are, not what you want, you need them to be. Bur, buried as you are in the midst of my reimaginings, well, maybe you can change. No doubt a fantasy, but still, but still. To live in this world, even if I have to make parts of it up, I have, I have to find something in it, something in you, to love.

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​Joanna Grant holds a Ph.D. in British and American literature, specializing in fictional as well as nonfiction travel narratives of the Middle East. She spent eight years in that region, notably two years in Afghanistan, teaching writing, mythology, and public speaking classes to American soldiers and gathering materials for her own memoir, which she is currently completing as part of an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Southern New Hampshire University under the direction of Mark Sundeen. Her poetry and prose have appeared widely in journals including Guernica and Prairie Schooner.