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Love Enters the Time Warp
by Debora Tremont

—It seems so easy now, to look back, to imagine
how things could have been different, but would they? —

I want to catch the edge
of time’s spiral, fall down
its rabbit hole like Alice,
tumble into an alternate space,
another dimension where
words curl into the air
like fragrant steam, where
pure want and need
bubble like champagne
into conversation,
and what is said
changes everything.
We sit under an elm tree,
light of decades filtering
through new leaves, and
discover each other
at that wrought iron
cafe table, set with
porcelain bowls and
silver spoons, eating
carrot soup and sharing
the beauty of who we are
meant to be, beloveds,
mother and daughter,
letting the spring breeze
gently blow away the hurt,
the fear, the loneliness,
let the sparkling light
erase the guilt and shame
of long-ago rejection
we could never talk about,
except in this time, this place,
the unsaid metamorphoses
into the said, and we love a new
relationship into being,
like butterflies, emerging
again and again
under that eternal elm.

PAINTING: At the Café by Edgar Degas (c. 1877). 

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: This poem was written in response to a prompt suggested by Ellen Rowland to rewrite a memory to create an alternate outcome. It looks back at a lunch under the elm tree, a mother and daughter who loved each other but couldn’t talk about an early trauma that came between them. I have pursued a daily poetry practice for three years, but I have never submitted a poem for publication before.

tremont copy

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Debora Tremont began writing poetry three years ago, at the age of 71, when she realized that pieces she wrote in an online memoir class were more suggestive of poetry than prose. She took a class with Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, began her own daily practice in May 2021, and continues to write poems every day that explore memories, the beauty of daily life, and the adventure of aging. She has lived on the Northshore of Lake Pontchartrain, an hour’s drive from New Orleans, Louisiana, since the levee failure after Hurricane Katrina. Her photos of her mother were lost in the flood.