the poet
Award-winning poet Tracie Renee (she/her) hails from the Chicago area. She's a librarian, book reviewer for Publishers Weekly, and Best of the Net nominated writer who pens everything from poetry and flash to novels and creative non-fiction. Her published pieces include work for kids, teens, and adults, and she's appeared in Frazzled Lit, HAD, Stanchion and elsewhere. In 2025, Tracie completed a mentorship program, earned a scholarship from Boyds Mills – formerly the Highlights Foundation – and won the I Am Writing Middle Grade Competition.
the poems
While the Rainforest Café Staff
Light Candles for Singing,
NASA Crashes a Comet
When you lean your head back
laughing
as hot pastel wax
sinks into buttercream,
I can’t decide if it’s
a good day to die or
a good day to be born.
What I know for sure is
whole worlds unfold in the tympanic flower
where your cochlea
teases meaning from curls of trembled air,
knowledge clocked at speeds of 1087 feet
per second. This week, NASA played billiards
with an asteroid seven million miles
from earth while researchers
drummed up
thirty-five new species of frogs
in the rainforest’s emerald ash.
Under the plastic canopy
caged in the mall,
wait staff descend
with a blazing plate
of well-wishes
and I remember
I woke
alone
this morning to vibrations:
someone singing the sun up
through the muffler of one wall,
someone singing the rain down
through the muffler of the other.
Maybe tomorrow the rain will stop but not the singing.
Maybe tomorrow the world will end but not your smile.
Maybe tomorrow the frogs that did not exist
yesterday
will lay eggs
in a place our flames can’t touch
and NASA will calculate the distance
between who I am and who you want me to be.
Now is
a wish on an ellipsed star,
a flame struck against dark,
a moment I gather like a bouquet –
your name in every blank of the chorus,
your hand still reaching for mine.
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Deadlines
The dog
doesn’t know
this is a lunch break,
doesn’t care
about my 27 emails,
6 spreadsheets,
1:15 zoom call.
He tasted a deadline
once
but prefers old shoes
and would rather smell roses at the park
anyway.
It’s just
that there are so many
roses.
And he is a clumsy butterfly, flitting
from one thing
to another,
s l o w,
uncertain of
which stick to bring home,
which tree to pee on,
which shrub to sniff.
We don’t have time
for this,
his nails need trimming,
grow longer still
as they click-clack
the concrete walk,
a metronome
of missed
chances.
Later
he’ll doze
in a puddle of light,
and move as the sun moves:
all the warmth his body makes
gone
before I get there.
Weight-bearing Exercise
At the gym, I start with eight-pound weights
and the shame of their small heft. Back flat
to the bench, one dumbbell per hand,
my arms abduct up like I’m sure that
I'll touch stars but I am sure
of nothing:
not the breath in my lungs,
not the muscles in motion,
not the reason I push up,
not the reason I hold on.
What I know for sure is eight pounds
is what my son weighed at birth,
the first time he began to
die. And now each weight
lowered to my heart
is a child
at my breast, begging breath
and love, and I think about
how the weight of what we carry
changes a body, how my muscles
have hardened
with nine years of holding
the pain I did not know
I still held and now
I am not sure I can do this.
I am not sure I want to, but
I push up. Tremble.
Grunt. Convince myself that
this weight will crush me
even as I heft it
overhead with a promise:
none of this
was ever about
not being strong
enough.
Publishing credits
While the Rainforest Café Staff Light Candles for Singing,
NASA Crashes a Comet: East on Central (Vol. 24)
Deadlines: Black Fox Literary Magazine (Issue 28)
Weight-bearing Exercise: exclusive first publication by iamb