Olivia Simpson Ellis

July 14, 1963, Academy, California

For Robert Mezey

I cry as I put on my long white dress,

cry as the veil is pinned to my hair.

And the tears keep coming.

The wedding cake is too warm not to cry—

the icing weeps, layers slide apart, slide away

from my mother’s hands onto the ground.

She buries her head in her apron and cries.

Too late to do anything about it.  All of us pile

into the black, bullet-proof Cadillac.

I’m in the back, watching

the needle hit 200 kilometers per hour

before my tears blur the numbers.

The driver is not stopping at stop signs

or red lights; the driver, my father, is drunk,

and he’s crying so hard

all the world’s a blur for him, too.

There’s no way to live through this,

I tell myself, no way to live . . .

An hour later we’re inside the church.

A brass quintet plays “Instruments of Joy”

as I walk up the aisle in tears.

I hear my father give me away in tears.

I hear myself cry out,

“I take you for all my years.”

July 14, 1964, Valle de Bravo, Mexico

It is my fourteenth visit to the village hospital.

Every day this week the doctor pushed

four large tablets up into my body,

trying to undo what the rapist did.

Today he said I was well,

and would I, well, allow him the honor?

I didn’t understand, so he made it clear.

I ran from the room

down Cherimoyo Lane

to a letter from you:

Eve is in the hospital with diabetes;

you have my letter. You’re hitchhiking home.

What I don’t know

is that you’re locked in a building by the border

for refusing to bribe,

that you’ve read and reread my letter

until you scream at the placid guards

who won’t answer.

You scream

until the soft, shy pacifist inside you

breaks away,

and you go for the throat of the nearest guard.

July 14, 1965, Buffalo, New York

Kinnell is covering the whole outfield;

he’ll win singlehanded if he has to.

A long fly is followed by a short;

he pulls a muscle and goes down.

Mezey is thrown out trying to steal third.

I’m at first, unaware that I’ve been hurt

until the pain shoots up my back and heart

and leaves me screaming in the dirt.

“Better give up the spikes, Kiddo,

if you wanna keep this baby,”

the low-key OB whispers into my ear.

We drive to Long Island where I crawl into the sea,

dragging a smoldering leg swollen three times over,

hoping the water will cool my world.

An ambulance ride ends at Temple Hospital

where an Italian doctor shakes his head no.

“No, there’s nothing we can do now.

She’ll be gone by morning.  Why didn’t you bring her in sooner?”

He wants to know.

Nobody answers.  Nobody knows.

I go under wondering why

nobody diagnosed blood clots in Buffalo.

Olivia Simpson Ellis taught creative writing at Pomona College, founded the Claremont Public Poetry Series, lectured and read throughout the United States, Mexico, Spain and the Czech Republic, founded a multilingual publishing house in Claremont that became a bridge for immigrant families into their new culture, published a book of peace poems by Claremont area students that was sent to every nation state in the world and given to the Hague Peace Conference during its Centennial Year. Children in the San Joaquin Valley. Her writing has been published by Poems of the American West, Random House, Knopf, RATTLE, LA Times, New York Times, Pomona Valley Review, Backwash, National Review, People Magazine, Susquehanna Quarterly, and many others. Email: osellis7@gmail.com