84 Mercer Rd. by Lillian Fuglei

The rain makes grass greener, at least

if my mother’s platitudes have you 

fixed. I always thought it just made 

the light beam like disco balls, shattering

skyward midnights. Though dispersed 

and dimmed, at least she has something

to glint off of, make her presence bigger

than the engineers or sailors or day laborers

who birthed her would allow. I think 

she was supposed to be a beacon, once. 

Greet men to the heaven they could find 

here, lest they sink up to the other one. Now, 

angleics rest, un-accoladed, the light 

dimmed as my legs lengthened, eventually

boarded through adolescence, she rests. 

There are traces of her, haunting my 

adulthood–the way god does, taunting. 

Frayed photo edges split the books I left

in childhood’s limbo. Her beacon unlight 

then as it is now, just before the rot set in. 

I marvel in her emptiness, the once warmth 

of invitation turned void. I slip the photo 

home bound, the box beneath my palms full 

of papers, slivers, bricks, dirt–the ashes of 

home, mourned.

---

“This piece was trashed pretty quickly after I wrote it. It was written for a specific call for submissions inspired by a painting of a lighthouse. After it was rejected from that call, I didn’t ever submit it anywhere else, so it ended up trashed. I never felt like there was another home it belonged in.”

Lillian Fuglei (they/she) is a lesbian poetess based in Denver, Colorado. She began writing poetry in High School, after a lifetime of attending open mics thanks to their mother. They bounce between poetry, journalism, and academia, hoping to find a home for her writing somewhere in between the three. You can find them on Instagram at literary.lillian or Twitter at LFuglei. Their debut chapbook, “Girlhood Scrapbook” is available now with Stain’d Arts.