Granddad
You took me to the park to feed the ducks, and the shop for strawberry laces; You saved up money for my pocket, Sliding it into my hand so my parents couldn’t see, Telling me to buy a new kite, but so proud when I bought bread for the ducks.
I’m sitting in bed and not crying. You are dead. My mum told me there was no point visiting again; You wouldn’t recognise me so I should go to the party; I listened. That was my last chance to see you; and I am angry, but only because it is easier than thinking about guilt.
Lack of grief. All through the funeral I feel nothing; able to enjoy the black dress I wear in choirs, Family filling the prayed for gap. Later, I find a photo and cry at last; But I’m not sure if it’s you I’m crying for, or the two years without buying bread for the ducks.
Jo Boon
Family Tree
I used to long for the ghost Of your patchouli-scented embrace: And those long summer afternoons which seemed too short, when we filled the silence of the lonely house with laughter. I still wish for the sweet taste Of your lies: Honey-filled and dripping irresistibly off your tongue. The times when I swirled them round My mouth and swallowed them. In the past I placed you at the base of my family tree: now it has a blank and you-shaped hole, that no one could ever fill.
Meredith LeMaître
The Cashier and the Devil
The cashier looks your mama up and down and declares her the devil even though she's the one with claw-like bangs and no sense of charity.
This is the bible belt and your mama might as well speak in tongues as she subtly bites her thumb in Shakespearean insult while the cashier ponders if it's coincidence or prophecy that has made your mama a servant of Satan.
Satan eats a lot of rice and beans. Fruit in season for dessert. Honey nut cheerios. A wild ride includes a coke and Snickers bar.
It's packed with peanuts and apocalypse apparently. Because your mama's ID carries the mark of the devil. Some numbers, 666, some numbers you won't remember, but you will remember that cashier.
Ray Ball
Making Apple Crumble
(For M.J.)
The apples this year are smaller than last but still they are crisp beneath my knife; their green skins are shiny, mostly without flaws, innocent of maggots and the attentions of birds. No bruised windfalls these, their flesh is tart and white. I plucked them just this morning from the tree. Its tender boughs are laden so heavy with fruit that their drooping lower leaves caress the ground. Very different this young tree planted lately by my father, from the gnarled and twisted giant I remember. Now he is five years gone where you went before him a whole long, troubled lifetime ago. How many tears have been dried since you and I made apple crumble in what in your house was always called the scullery? There was a Belfast sink you cleaned daily with Vim and a drainer made of soap-softened, well-scrubbed wood. Our joint preparations were simpler then: I climbed the tree while you collected windfalls. You gathered them to you in the folds of your skirt; dipping and rising your hand raised to your eyes. You looked like a ship in full sail. And while the yellow sun shone I yearned for your strength, the bigness of your stride and your great knowing. Your pink, fleecy bloomers worn even in summer were the flag that you flew that signalled home.
Abigail Elizabeth Ottley
Family Get-Together
The uncles on the lawn are dicing the younger generation into horsemeat. The aunts' conversation feeds off the hair-styles of others.
And then there's the gnats, at the height of their biting season. And the sizzle of the grill, sausages burning at the stake.
The outside bilious, indoors was never more attractive. Besides which, a grandmother's eye has picked me like lint off the coat of all these others. The interrogation is wordless and old school – what are you doing with your life?
There are times when relatives suffocate and solitude is breathing. I make my excuses and head indoors. A family of one awaits.
John Grey
Son
He cries sand again this morning, freckles rolling down his cheek, beads of grit he sometimes flicks with his tongue and crunches, yearning for ice.
His eyes have never been drier, streaks of silt hatched with cherry scratches, rubbed shingle with the back of his sleeve.
It’s getting in his ears now and even in his hair. But we are lucky today, there’s no wind to fan drought and whip his small face
and we smile about this and I whisper spring splash and drenched eyelashes and when he moves away my ear tickles with beach.
Rachel Bower
My Anna
She was short of stature and withered by age, but she was never frail. In fact she was as strong as hell. Surviving more wars than I could count. She hailed from the old country, across the sea. Poverty and abuse made her who she was.
Her stern mouth never wore a smile, at least not that I could recall. Grandmom was not a name we ever used, she was always Babci to us. It would feel strange to call her by any other name. She spoke mostly in her native tongue and a few phrases of broken English for our sake.
Vain in the beauty of her youth, her gray thinning hair dyed pitch black, pin-curled, and held in place by a net. Those loving hands mottled with age spots and twisted from arthritis. She was no stranger to hard work, and her hands showed it proudly.
I can still envision her tiny, two room apartment, where we were always greeted with the aroma of stewed sauerkraut and kielbasa that had been cooking all day. Whenever I make those old Polish recipes, the memory of smell and taste take me back to those small rooms, and into my Babci's warm arms once again.
Ann Christine Tabaka
Her voice
It was a shock when I realised that I had forgotten her voice. I had no recording, and no contacts with relatives who might help, or technology that might salvage lost fragments, in steel canisters, on a dusty outhouse shelf.
Or find nuggets in some computer’s urinary tract. A laptop hiding secrets in its attaché case compartment. I realised that at the moment when you most need a hacker, none can be found, and that my mother had died far too soon for salvation, in any digital context or realm.
Too soon for digital archives, repositories, iPhones or tablets, for anything as simple as an answerphone message, or flickering Betamax recording. And I felt jealous of a gigabyte, and of the sticky and amorphous mass of information exhibited today. But then maybe my mother is much happier where she is. She cannot be cut, or pasted.
Claire Sexton
What the Owl-Watcher Said
She has five of them scattered around in the trees -- if you can locate them. She has each stashed in a different location because each egg that's laid and hatches is about a week after the previous one, so they don't all leave the nest at the same time and she can feed each one separately.
The owl-watcher tells me this when I meet him on the path through this same aspen grove I delight in most mornings. I've seen him many times on my morning strolls. This is the first time we've actually conversed, other than the usual "Good morning".
These are Long-eared Owls, he says in response to my query, a species unknown to me, though I've seen many species of owls. I don't know whether these owls are what he claims, but I have no reason to doubt him and it is obvious he has been keeping tabs on the family.
We stand, watch an unmoving fledgeling, perched on a gnarly twist of dying poplar, and I am surprised at the bird's size. If this is an immature youngster, how large are the parents?
I'm musing this when the owl-watcher says, The mother swooped along this path one evening, flew so close to my head I could feel the air move above me, but it never touched me, nor made a passing sound. Totally silent. Just the moving of air. It may have been hunting mice or voles. Or maybe it was trying to tell me something. Maybe it was some kind of warning.
Glen Sorestad
Bloodline
Line of blood spills out like syrup a split instant following the surgeon's scalpel just under my wife's swollen belly.
She lies there in dozen-hour labor stupor arms stretched out on the operating room's crucifix table.
Small inverted Christmas tree angel of a woman, saintly, delirious, and prayerful.
I don't look down at her face – the blood and what follows hold my eyes wide open.
Our daughter is lifted from the wet cavity cut across my wife.
No blood on her - it is all on her mother.
Sound swirls around us, many voices loudly in a hurry to be heard. Numbers and words thick with terminology
My daughter, in given statistics, a weight and a rating, by these loud people.
A miracle to me, a procedure to them.