She’s not there
but she will
forever lie
between their bones—
Dad’s mistress

A drawerful
of kaleidoscopes
for the grandkids
who never
materialize

They won’t be here long—
the least I can do
is pull up a chair
to keep the peonies
company

—“They won’t be here long—” was published previously in Atlas Poetica (Number 21, 2015), and appears here with permissions from the author and M. Kei, editor of Atlas Poetica.

Alexis Rotella

is the curator/editor of Unsealing Our Secrets, a MeToo poetry anthology available on Kindle and Amazon. She is an award-winning poet and digital artist who has been writing Japanese poetry forms in English since the late 1970s. Her passions include her acupuncture practice in Arnold, Maryland and mobile photography, which is featured regularly on Instagram and Facebook sites.

Ms. Rotella’s work has been published throughout the world, and she is the author of dozens of books. Her latest collection of Japanese forms in English, The Color Blue, was released by Red Moon Press in 2017. Her out-of-print haiku and tanka books, as well as her newest works, can be read on Kindle. Her digital art is for sale online at Alexis Rotella Designs.

Self-Portrait © 2018 By Alexis Rotella All rights reserved

Don’t try to figure me out everything I write is fiction all of it true —From Alexis Rotella’s Lip Prints: Tanka and Other Short Poems, 1979–2007 (Modern English Tanka Press, 2007); poem and self-portrait appear here with her permission.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Purple: A Parable by Alexis Rotella, with pictures by Diane Katz (Rosenberry Books, 2008)

⚡ Purple, the first poem Alexis ever wrote, and one which has been reprinted many times during the decades since