“Tremolos for Eli” by Sarah Key

Editor’s note: “Not a word wasted, vivid and moving, this sonnet is a work of gentle joy, of life’s truth, of beautiful alliteration and sound.”

Tremolos for Eli

There you sit at the bottom of the stairs
like a sumo wrestler, a gentle fat roll spilling
over your diaper, legs folded under you
like a yogi, bare back erect as if practicing

posture. Your humors have nothing to do
with the elements or the ancients’ balancing fluids. 
What giggles you is knocking blocks, flooding  
the bidet, open-shutting all the cabinets. You watch 

your father play frivolous, that cute Latin
diminutive of the crumbled frivos, on his tongue. 
Like stringing beads, your papa piles on the rolling
double r’s – cerrado, perro, burro – 

his trill after trill tickles your belly, your joy 
escapes like a breath you don’t need to hold.

Having lived by writing cookbooks and essays and editing art books, Sarah Key feels most at home in a poem, a place to settle in an unsettled world. It is her privilege to explore the wonder of words with students and tutors at a community college in the South Bronx where she is Poet-in-Practice. She reads as many literary journals and anthologies as possible and is grateful to dozens of them that have published her poems, such as The Georgia Review, Tuesday; An Art Project, Calyx, Poet Lore, Nasty Women Poets, and American Writers Review 2020. She believes heaven can be reached on earth by digging in the Yucatan sand with her one-year-old grandson born in Mexico last year.