“Writers ready?”

“Here are your seven words or phrases: 

Rumi, beef stroganoff, A Wrinkle in Time, a dozen roses, rabbit, sun, and blue.”

“You have fifteen minutes to write a piece which includes all these words.”

“Pens up!”

“GO!”

————

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day.

I’ll find a Rumi poem for him and he will buy me a dozen roses.

He will NOT make me beef stroganoff because that’s one of the few dishes I actually know how to cook. (Thank you Hamburger Helper.)

He will make bacon-wrapped filet mignons with asparagus and baked potatoes because that’s how I roll. He might even put crab and Hollandaise on top to make it Filet Oscar- Ooh La La!  (I won’t mention the beer…)

At dinner, we will tell the kids the story of when he proposed to me on Valentine’s Day 1995 and hope that their hearts are smiling underneath the eye-rolling.

I’ll do the dishes afterwards.

Then, while my daughter reads, “A Wrinkle in Time,” I’ll slather retinol on my skin to hide the wrinkles of time caused by too many days in the sun with baby oil on my face “in my younger and more vulnerable years,” and I’ll lie down next to her and read something light, like Crime and Punishment, yearning for the days when we would read Margaret Wise Brown’s The Runaway Rabbit—I mean, “Bunny” (Geez, I’m getting old.) 

I’ll eventually look up at the putrid green ceiling that we swore we would paint over when we moved into this house fifteen years ago, until life, in the form of, oh, you don’t want to know, sort of got in the way. 

Finally, my daughter will go to her room, my husband and I will go to bed, and all of the roses/the Rumi/the wrinkles in time from too much sun/ the Hamburger Helper beef stroganoff/ The Runaway Bunny (not rabbit)/ will be sealed into my soul as we make love underneath the putrid green ceiling that I close my eyes and imagine to be 

robin

     egg 

         blue…..

“Time’s up!”

“Pens down, writers!”

Holding a BFA from the University of Texas, Lisa Molina has taught high school English and theatre, and served as Associate Publisher of Austin Family Magazine. Her poetry can be found in TheDaily Drunk Magazine, Trouvaille Review, Beyond Words Magazine, Ancient Paths, Indolent Books-Poems in the Afterglow, and The Ekphrastic Review, She lives in Austin, Texas.