Talking Elsewhere, Everywhere
My mother would have been
so set with a cell phone,
everyone assuming
she was talking to a chum,
sharing a joke,
snapping down the street
cell to ear, sweet talking.
At home,
when she talked to herself,
only family could hear
and we took her aimless chatter
in stride. But at the mall,
along downtown streets,
her constant chatter
gave others pause,
they whispered,
cornered me in the gym
to say they had heard her.
My mother
might have opted
for Bluetooth,
a tiny angel perched
behind her ear,
its bright flash
as she rambled along
talking to God and the dead,
those folks who
were always home.
Empty Nester
I live alone.
My adult daughter
gives me
a robotic massager
to ease away the stress,
to help me relax,
an awkward, oversized
vibrating harness
with a mini-light show,
revolving nodes beaming red.
At the end of the day,
I pull its shy bulk to me
and we cozy on the couch.
I push the buttons,
drill down into the pain,
click warm or warmer,
hard or harder,
forward, reverse,
its quiet whir
a conversation
I had long forgotten.
That is All the Time We Have for Today
Anger management issues,
I whisper to the cat,
when tiny brother dog toddles by
and she lassoes his neck for a ride.
She leans into his twitching ears
and is about to rear back
when she catches me watching,
checks herself and begins
a leisurely bath.
There is little hope for this cat.
She killed her therapist, a mouse
who worked with her remotely
from behind the fridge.
These kitchen talks went late
into the night as both struggled
with boundaries.
Like too many therapists,
the mouse imagined
they had made
much more progress
than they ever might.
Poems Online
The Scots (I have changed the title since publication)
Post from Kaye Byer, former poet laureate of North Carolina
Three poems published by the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature
Upcoming Readings
The Black Socks Poets at the Plant!
November 12, 2025, 6:00 PM - 7:00 pm
Pittsboro
192 Lorax Ln, Pittsboro, NC 27312, USA
Free reading
Come hear some of our most talented local poets as the Black Socks take the stage. The roster includes Paul Jones, Gary Phillips, Maura High, Jan Harrington, Florence Nash, Carrboro poet laureate - Laura Wolff, Ralph Earle, Debra Kaufman and Grey Brown.
What It Takes
At the Center of these poems reside the eternally-connected bodies that make up a family: a father dying as a granddaughter is born, a mother's body laboring in birth, a child's growing body slowly revealing the story of autism. Grey Brown writes of these matters with extraordinary courage and great beauty.
Grey Brown's poems are remarkable for their formal poise, their subelty, and their refusal to settle for easy answers to the complexities of married life and raising chlldren (especially a child with autism). It's the inclusivity of mind and heart - this abiity to explore ambivelence without diminshing her commitment to self and other, to balance the burden of a mother's overwhelming love against the burden of a child's overwhelming need - that makes What It Takes so compeling.
There is a physicality in the language of Grey Brown's poems that is appetizing or sensual - arousing and answering a hunger for insight, music, connection.
When They Tell Me
Here is the steady gaze of a poet in complete command of her material, however close to the bone. The collection is a rare jewel indeed, a deeply personal story of enormous sadness that becomes art in the hands of a wonderful writer, every line of it trailing light.
Staying In
First place winner - North Carolina Writers' Network
Harper Prints Chapbook Contest
Grey Brown is a wonderful poet with a strong talent for rendering the sensations, immanences and strangeness of childhood. Saturn with its rings is a google eye: the bear in the cage is a caged shadow; all the trucks in America speed toward the father's produce warehouse. These observations once were true - now Grey Brown makes them true again. Simply fine!
