Grandma Whispers Secrets

Beyond the frozen pond, past the field left fallow where the mare shakes off sleep, where once you and I chased the fox from the brown leghorns, lies a rough-hewn wooden fence chiseled with initials inside a heart. Walk the snowy path flattened by the stomp of your Mama’s boots, find the rail to the right of the gate, slide halfway under, and look up, toward the clouds racing like my heart once did. There. Weathered. Chiseled with a pen knife. Our initials. His and mine. Etched forever. I love him still. Promise. Promise? Show no one else. Never tell Pappy.

January / February 2023

---

Anne Anthony’s poetry has been published in Glass Mountain Magazine, Poetry South, Postcards Poems and Prose Magazine. Her poem, She Wants, published by Blue Heron Review, was nominated for a Pushcart Award. She was selected as the Gold Writer by ArtAscent for her poem, High Horse. In 2019, she released a flash fiction collection, A Blue Moon & Other Murmurs of the Heart. She lives and writes in North Carolina.

Art: Kimberlee Frederick. It Slipped Through My Fingers. Digital Collage, 2021