I hold one holly leaf
while you holy
Granny’s grave
with goosebones,
egg shells, prickly
pine cones that cut
your palm.
Silly, I think,
silly Sister,
with your old
mountain offerings
to the dead.
How, after all,
can grief be
a thing graspable?
Or holy be
a thing held? Silly
Sister.
Then the point
of the holly pierces
my thumb.
Brother, you say,
give me your hand.
We bleed together,
staining the dirt red.
MARY ALICE DIXON grew up in Carolina red dirt mixed with Appalachian coal dust and her grandmother’s mountain lore. Mary Alice has been a professor of architecture and landscape history, an advocate for abused children, and a door-to-door encyclopedia seller (yes, she’s that old), though not all at the same time. She is also a Pushcart nominee and 2023 NC Poetry Society Poet Laureate Award finalist. Her writing is in Broad River Review, Kakalak, Litmosphere, Main Street Rag, moonShine Review, Northern Appalachian Review, Pinesong, 2024 Poetry in Plain Sight and elsewhere. Mary Alice lives in Charlotte, NC where she is a longtime hospice volunteer who teaches Grief Writing Workshops. These workshops include found poems, blueberry scones, and hand painted healing stones. She often walks in cemeteries, talking to ghosts, including those of her dead cats, Alice B. Toklas and Thomas Merton.