Late one night
walking home
alone
I felt a long pink
finger nail
touch the
pad of my thumb finger
and it was my own
and somehow
I thought
to my grandma
how many bottles
of pink nail polish
collected in that
far from antique
white plastic container
and at visits
the rummaging
I would do
inspecting each color
and she taught me how
to paint each nail
one on the left,
one in the center,
one on the right,
for each nail
and when they
were drying she
would tell me
to blow
I would sit
so tall and proud
for not having smudged them
Such a childish thing
and yet how warmly
I remember this
when she died
I could have all of her
nail polishes
Wow, it has been a long time since I wrote for Hello Poetry. I started writing on this website as the only outlet for an awkward teenaged girl who was the only one in her classes enjoying poetry. Looking back, the content I was putting on the site wasn’t very good, but I loved the community here. So much has changed since then and I think as you get older you come to realize less is more when it comes to poetry. (With amount of words used at least). It will sometimes be months since I’ve written anything, but I wrote this one late a night or two ago, recalling this memory of my grandma. When she died, I lost a huge mother figure in my life. My own mother was not the type to paint nails.
