Long blades extending,
sessile leaves cry a stem
as cold rain pools.
They stare, from a grey
stone afar, while two young ropes
sink your stiff oak chest
and un petit buis—quiet
shrub—sits lethargically
on your André’s grave.
GRAND-MAMAN
She smelt of old
age. She smelt
of clothes
tightly packed
and stored
in the winter-
clothes trunk.
For as long
as I knew her,
she smelt
that way.
I never thought
that I would
pack winter
clothes tightly
in the winter-
clothes trunk,
in the middle
of winter,
just to smell
her again.
E.C. Belli studied creative writing at Columbia University in the City of New York with Sophie Cabot Black, Mark Strand, and Emily Fragos. She was selected to participate in Columbia's Honors Poetry Workshop along with six other students and received Writing Departmental Honors upon graduation. Her work can be read in Spoon River Poetry Review, Iodine Poetry Journal, Poetry Salzburg, The Columbia Review, Absinthe: New European Writing, and International Poetry Review; it is also upcoming in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review.
