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The Day Before Graduation

May 27, 2026 by Rosemerry


for Vivian
 
Already she knows terrible things happen. 
Already she knows the pleasure of scrambling
in the woods at night with friends and singing
too loud and making bad choices that are sometimes
exactly the right choices. She knows sobs and 
silliness. She knows how much humans can hurt
each other. She knows how a touch or a tender
word erases nothing but creates its own plot of trust. 
 
There was a time when my job was to protect her,
filling her pages with beauty and courage and honesty.
Now my job is mostly to love her, to give her her own pen. 
Because terrible things happen. And she is the one now 
who shapes her story. Every writer knows, we write 
what we know—and what we can’t ever know. 
I pray what emerges is the impossible—an irrational,
deep rooted love for this difficult, glorious world. 

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What Goes On

May 25, 2026 by Rosemerry


Knowing it will grow back tomorrow
does not stop me from pulling
the bindweed today. Once I pulled 
bindweed as if the goal was to clear it 
from the garden. Now, I pull bindweed 
as if the goal is to love this act of being 
alive, this ritual of pulling bindweed, my 
daughter beside me, soft easy chatter 
rising between us.        There is no blessing 
or disaster yet that has ended this 
communion of tugging on the long white 
roots. Somehow, in this season of 
endings, the bindweed seems to promise
tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. 
 

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After Watching the Difficult Film

May 24, 2026 by Rosemerry


                  with thanks to the makers of Your Attention, Please


I go to the hillside at the end of the valley
and sit beside the gray stone with his name on it.
I am in need of deep grounding.
My beloved friend comes alongside. We sit
on the ground beside the grave, frothy white 
seeds of dandelions clinging to our clothes.
We sit until the sun moves away from the valley, 
climbing toward the peaks. I do not mind being sad. 
Sad makes sense when I think of how any child 
can no longer imagine this is a world in which
they belong. This world of green aspen leaves
and alpine snow fields and delicate dandelion fluff. 
This world in which any human is made to feel 
as if they are not enough. How many? And how 
many more? I run my fingers through the tall 
cemetery grass. How green it is. My friend
and I listen to the chaos of birdsong riffling 
across the canyon. I am near destroyed
by the damn beauty of it. The tiniest drift
of cloud goes by. No, not destroyed. 
Opened. 

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

*Hey, friends, I have been going to see films at MountainFilm in Telluride this weekend, and tonight I saw such a profoundly moving, disturbing, insightful, intelligent film about the effects of social media on young people (and all of us). If you get a chance to see Your Attention, Please, it offers compelling reasons for why we might want to rethink our relationship with social media. 

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Shh

May 23, 2026 by Rosemerry


 
 
So soft and sweet the scent 
of this lilac’s first bloom
I stop trying to praise it 
and instead breathe it in—
 
the eager vibration 
of hummingbird wings
says everything.

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Intention

May 22, 2026 by Rosemerry

In the garden, fill a hole with water,
eventually it will drain. Fill it with trash, 
with poor soil, nothing—or weeds—
will grow. But fill the hole with topsoil, 
intentional seed—is it any wonder 
something beautiful eventually thrives? 
Consider the hollow left when a loved one 
is gone. Nothing will ever be the same as it was. 
But if I protect the hollow, allow into it, 
more feeling, more love, more honest connection, 
if I sow there whatever goodness I grieve, 
then how deep the roots might go. How true,
the sapling, its leaves so verdant, 
so heartachingly new, so unashamedly green. 

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Two Thousand Three Hundred Forty

May 22, 2026 by Rosemerry


 
 
That’s how many school lunches
I’ve made her, more or less, since
that first day she held my hand and we 
stood on the grass outside the elementary school
before the first bell rang. Her hair was blonde then, 
mine not gray. I’m not crying as I make her
lunch this morning. Dilled bean and rice salad. 
Fresh blackberries. Pretzel sticks. 
Honeycrisp apples sliced into thin rounds
that her friends call “floppy apples.”
Maybe I’m crying. 
Me and all the other mothers on the last
day of the last year of school. Thinking of
two thousand three hundred forty bleary mornings
when I woke to pour love into plastic containers
along with dried mango and tofu cubes,
seaweed strips and yogurt tubes.
Okay. So I’m crying. I nibble the squared off core 
of the apple to gather every last bit of sweetness.
When it’s gone, I lick the stickiness from my fingers.

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Ritual

May 20, 2026 by Rosemerry


                  As if the losing makes us more of what we are.
 
 
It’s not as if the clouds were parted and
some waterfall of golden light poured forth. 
No rainbow smeared its hues across the storm-
bruised sky. No wondrous star. No kings with gold.
No angel choir. The sun did not stand still. 
No burning bush. No parted seas. No feast
of fish and bread. Sometimes the aching heart
wants blatant, flagrant proof of holiness.
 
Tonight it was the swallows as they keeled
and curved, converged, dispersed and re-appeared
that altered me. Though truly, it was not 
the birds and more the watching as they swooped, 
the watching till the watching self dissolved 
and the world was only space and darkling wings.

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The Night I Remembered What Love Can Do

May 19, 2026 by Rosemerry

What is unwanted still serves. 
                  —Sam Aureli, “Dandelions”

I was just sitting on the edge of the porch,
but I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t breathe, 
I was sobbing and scared and hurting and
I couldn’t fucking breathe; panic surged in me,
my brain screamed red, and I tried to breathe— 
why couldn’t I breathe?—as my chest squeezed 
and sobs quaked and shook and stole me, 
and I couldn’t feel my heart. Wait. I couldn’t feel 
my heart? A star-bright awareness sang in me then
like a one-note song I could follow home through 
any darkness or density. Not that the terror disappeared, 
but in attuning myself to my heart, my physical heart 
opened enough to hold the terror. I sat on the edge 
of the porch. Just sat. And was breathed.

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 Over Time 

May 18, 2026 by Rosemerry

 

 
The way my grandmother tended 
to her daylilies, that is the way
I want to attune to your words—
knowing how each utterance blooms
only briefly, but when cared for,
the plant itself is hardy, long lasting,
abundant, able to survive both
heat and chill, both loam and clay. 
Come love, whisper to me. 
I cherish every petal. And when
there is no bloom, I have learned 
water and fertilize anyway, to honor
the place where the bloom will be.  

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Self-Portrait as Seedling

May 17, 2026 by Rosemerry


 
 
To know the self as seedling again.
To push against the home I’ve known
before launching into ecstatic stretch. 
To trust again how the slenderest threads 
will anchor me to the world. 
I had become so enamored with blooming,
I forgot the joy of initiation, 
the thrill of not knowing, 
the startlement of reaching through
darkness into light. 
I’d forgotten the earnest striving
that comes before bud, before petal, 
before effulgent perfume.
To be held by it again, 
that sacred uncertainty. 
To feel the flush of becoming 
what I already am.

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