Sweetgrass, Morse Code, & Mother Exhaled, by Ellis Elliott

Dear Readers,

Florida poet Ellis Elliott has three beautiful poems about family and the intimacies and indignities of aging. 

Please read and share with someone who needs a little beauty in their life today.

Happy reading!

The Derailleur Press Team

Sweetgrass

She bends silvery-green sweetgrass
leaves into woven baskets in a ritual
as rote 

as a low-country Sunday school hymn.
Both held and pulled with her right hand,  

the coils must be taut with tension and strong 
enough to hold water. She sketched rooms 

to scale in her red spiral notebook, sewed 
the teal silk curtains, and died in the
house 

I moved into. In the kitchen were her copper
cooking pots, her cracked oyster plates,  

her mint-green matchbox from Paris, 
her baskets on cabinet tops, and her three  

lost boys. I search for something sturdy  to
contain their grief. And when it can’t be found,  

I become my own flawed variation. My broad 
leaves braid and curl around all of us.

Morse Code

It’s been buried almost a year now under 
the Kleenex box and books on the table beside 
my desk. It took a year for me to look inside 
the red steno pad, the one missing its back cover 
and always beside her at the nursing home.

​It was filled with words written by others,
like her caregiver, nurse assistant, or me:

Her weight, month by month. 
Medication list. 
Book recommendations for the Kindle: Becoming, Hipbillies,
Love of a Good Woman.
Six-line, large, block-print letter reminders:  
PT: Fri., 10:00 a.m.  
Razorback basketball game: 6:00 p.m., ESPN. 
Podcast recommendations: Hidden Brain, On Being.

It was filled with words she wrote, her once-smooth curl 
of cursive now sharp angles of stops and starts, words
she called me to remember.

What’s the material my blanket is made of?  
One page, one word: flannel

​What is that nice man nurse’s name? 
One page, one word: Trevor

​Each page written in black Sharpie, 
one bleeding into the next. A faint 
imprint of the words that came  
on the page before, then dots  
like Morse code, then page 
after page, empty.

Mother Exhaled

and the smoke lifted into sunlight, slanting  in hazy
prisms from the carved corners  of her Waterford
crystal ashtray. To my young self, it was an oracle’s
cauldron conjuring  messages in fire and clouds.
Once, I sat beside her upturned palm and read her
life lines, her skin  as thin as rolling papers. Toward
the end, she sat  alone in her ash-wounded recliner
at night. She kept her hand-carved cane close and,
by the glow  of the yellowed linen lampshade,
she blew smoke rings. She knew by then it was too late.
She knew the spell had already been cast.



Ellis Elliott has been published in Belle Ombre, The Broken Plate, Brushfire Literature & Arts Journal, Copperfield Review Quarterly, Courtship of Winds, Literary Mama, The MacGuffin, Meadow, OPEN: Journal of Arts and Letters, Riggwelter, Neologism Poetry Journal, Perceptions Magazine, Plainsongs, Signal Mountain Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, Sierra Nevada Review, Streetlight Magazine, and Wrath-Bearing Tree. She participated in the Palm Beach Poetry Festival 2015 Workshop with poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil. Ellis received a bachelor’s degree in English from Rhodes College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University. She has taught ballet for over 30 years, and currently teach ballet, yoga, and lead online and in-person writing groups. She and her husband has a blended family of six grown sons and she enjoy mixed-media art, swimming, and miniatures.