"The Tracks of My Tears" • Smokey Robinson & The Miracles (by Amy Laessle-Morgan)

I. Side A 

A tongue 

stained Michigan cherry 

from a roadside stand off M-53. 

Summer’s first sweat, 

all lemonade-pulped air, 

syruped with June and lawnmower exhaust— 

when the lake is still too cold 

but everyone jumps in anyway, 

and cicadas rattle at dusk like loose pearls in a pillbox. 

Tracks of My Tears threads through me 

like needlepoint grief. 

Its backbeat finds me between sprinkler arcs, 

between my shoulder blades— 

in hips that remember Motown, 

it spills, 

pours through the mesh screen door, 

drips into my ear. 

There is something about lyrics 

that have slept in your chest since girlhood— 

like strawberries softening on the counter 

till they surrender into jam, 

till sweetness ferments, 

till juice stains the wooden cutting board.

I was raised on four-part harmonies, 

voices rasped from the back of a throat 

where truth gets caught. 

Smokey’s falsetto was the only kind of religion I understood—

a psalm I could sway to. 

This is where the ache was conceived, 

in gauzy kitchen light slanting across linoleum, 

my mother swaying in her slippers, 

worn thin at the heel. 

I watched her move alone, 

held by melodies no one else could see. 

And I want to be held. 

And I want someone to hold onto. 

II. Side B 

My fingers want to curl around his shoulder, 

play the B-sides of a girl’s unfinished question. 

I feel the tremor— 

not in his spine, 

but in the misstep 

he doesn’t know I felt. 

The music enters 

like breath, like balm, 

like a slow inheritance 

inside the deep hum of a bassline 

that parts the sternum. 

This is how we pass grief 

you and I, back and forth 

hand to shoulder 

cheek to jaw 

palm to pulse—

like a glass filled with heartbreak too warm to drink: my mouth on the rim, then yours, then mine again— never asking whose sorrow it is, 

only knowing it tastes familiar. 

You say nothing, 

and that feels right. 

I close my eyes because it’s easier that way— 

easier to pretend we’re not inside a pain that’s hereditary slow, 

and half-fermented. 

His hand at my back— 

not guiding, 

more like tethering, 

as if afraid I might slip into the music 

and not come back. 

There’s a kind of steady mercy in 4/4 time 

and still, I find myself wondering 

if he knows what he’s touching. 

I press my cheek to his shoulder— 

not because I trust him, 

but because the song understands something 

I’ve spent years trying to unlearn. 

Sometimes, 

grief needs to be danced with 

until it stops leading. 

His thumb brushes my back. 

I think of cold linoleum floors and press in—closer than I should

because the song is ending and I’ve never been good at letting

things go quietly.

Amy Laessle-Morgan is a poet based in Southeast Michigan. Her work has been published in Gypsophila Art & Literary Magazine, Sterling Script, Poetic Reveries Magazine, Artifex Literary Magazine, Livina Press, Squirrel Cane Press, Azarão Lit Journal and Two Key Customs. She is also the author of East Coast Heartbreak, her debut poetry collection. When she’s not writing, she enjoys photography, listening to records and playing bass guitar — not well, but with feeling. You can find more of her work on Instagram @ultramarine_poetry.