Poetry
One Day Older
Each morning, I pull back our top sheet
and slide into the bed’s buttery softness. Early
riser, I return to wake you, to throw my leg
over you as you face me and I take in
your still-blue-eyed beauty, though you say
this casts aspersions on my sanity.
We are one day older. Each day
we stack like coins on the bedside
before you rise and shave and head
to the kitchen to mollify pets,
drink your coffee over NY Times obits,
which you later report, especially
if the dead are your age, or all too young.
We may worry how this love story ends
but today – and maybe tomorrow and the next
day – we will decide whether to grill
pork chops for dinner or make linguine. I will
remind you to hydrate because July, nowadays,
is sweltering, and you will turn on the AC
when I get distracted. But mostly we’ll
go about our day on separate tracks until
we happen to converge at morning.
One day older.
Tricia Gates Brown
Tricia Gates Brown’s poetry has appeared in Portland Review, Friends Magazine, and Mason Street Literary Review, among other publications, and her flash story Cold Wave won a Winter 2024 Pop-Up Writing Contest with Brilliant Flash Fiction. Her debut novel Wren won a 2022 Independent Publishers Award Bronze Medal. By trade, she is an editor and co-writer residing in northwestern Oregon, mainly working on projects for the National Park Service and Native tribes. For fun, she makes art. Her poetry collection Of a Certain Age is forthcoming from Fernwood Press in early 2025.