Costume Jewelry

​

Grandma’s ring should’ve died with her.
No one wanted it but no one could let it go.
Its stone so green it winked through fabric,
a cat’s eye through satin curtains.

​

Mom swore it was glass.
Grandma: a crown jewel.

​

My mom would murmur,
Gaudy, during birthday parties.
Cheap costume jewelry, when we attended plays,
as if glass or acrylic couldn’t harden
into something sacred.

​

Peridot was grandma’s story, an artifact of
Sunday light trapped in olivine.
Never removed, not even in the pool,
its soul tattooed itself into her skin.  

​

She stared at the ring the way a person
looks at an old picture of faces long gone.
She wore its tint to bed,
let it fold into her prayers, her thin skin grooved
by its weight, its oblong shape.

​

When she died, the ring, destined for a thrift store,
found my daughter’s hand. A perfect fit
for hands she never touched.

​

Mom came to admire the ring on the five-year-old finger.
Tradition licked skin like lichen does stone.
A green eye keeping watch across generations.

First published in Last Leaves Magazine, Issue 11, July 2026,  pg. 81