Bio: Ann Kathryn Kelly writes from New Hampshire’s Seacoast region. She’s an editor with Barren Magazine, a columnist with WOW! Women on Writing, and she works in the technology sector. Ann leads writing workshops for a nonprofit that offers therapeutic arts programming to people living with brain injury. Her writing has appeared in a number of literary journals. https://annkkelly.com/
* Author’s Note:
Short reveries about moments of renewal, and the importance of rest, and how sadness visits all of us, at times.
Shedding Moment Lately, I’ve wanted to cut my hair, shorten my skirt, shed my years like the long, skinny snakes shed skins in my garden. I’ve not seen nature’s shedding moment in progress. I see only evidence left behind, wrinkled skin, paper-thin, a ghostly remnant left on stones or in mulch that marks a passage. I think about a snake’s fresh skin, how it might glisten in newness as it slithers and slides against pebbles or rakish grass, emerging anew. The final shed revealing shine, both smooth and cool, before starting to dry under a high, hot sun. I want the secret, this wriggling out of the old to reveal the new, no matter how fleeting the result. Rise My skin, this winter morning, thirsts. For lotion, a balm to soothe my constant itching, my punishment for huddling too near the wood stove. I gnaw chapped lips and taste the salt of blood. My nose, today, burns, in a corner of one nostril. The tingle, familiar. Cold sore coming. I am dry all over. It is winter in New England. Short days, long nights. I am crinkling, wisping, my head like a browned flower left clinging to a once-lush plant. Beneath this parched wrapper, I conserve energy. Rest. Spring will come again and with it, my rise from dormancy. Grief, in Gray Grief steals in quiet, on silent paws, like a wolf that roams, sniffing an edge-line, like a mist that seeps, blanketing all, like a stone that marks a life once lived. Softer than black, no longer red with rage, my grief is gray with the length of time, of processing, of making peace. I sit in a room with yellow walls and watch a pale sun slip beyond a window ledge, a curtain call to another day. I step into remnants of retreating light, wanting to elevate a mood in free-fall. With nightfall, I part a curtain to look at the moon. A mournful sound starts quiet in my head, pacing, moving to a throat. My throat, tipped in gray fur.
Fevers of the Mind 