In Paradisum

The basement furnace died at 3AM.

The chilly weather of early spring

Arrives by degrees inside the house,

Like seawater leaking into a hull.

 

We bundle up, treasuring our warmth.

By afternoon, the halls have chilled, as wind

Whines tunelessly and rattles at the glass.

“In Paradisum” from Fauré’s Requiem

 

Chimes down the crooked stairs like lazy stars

Revolving overhead, pining away

For me, yearning to have me home again,

Out there shining in solar Sargassos

 

Or ocean swirls of discarded plastic

Gathering in Pacific emptiness.

Fresh dust snows on furniture and floor. I breathe

The busy air, teeming with life, split by shafts

 

Of sunlight. My voice is dry from all the dust.

It’s taken over everything. It coats

The meniscus of my glass of water.

It’s made of us, our cats and candles—

 

Rumors of how our lives will be consumed—

Particles of meteor and pollen,

The powder that puddles on the floorboards

As nails are hammered into old walls—

 

Iridescent archipelagos of pearl

Trailing lagoons of chalk dust in their wakes.

Our self-incineration, which hardly hurts,

Starts lightning racing into nothingness.

 

I know we’re dust, and stardust too, but more—

Phosphorescent dust in oceans of sunlight,

Like breaths exhaled, diffusions, traces of song,

Engines firing in the voiceless dark.


Ernest Hilbert is the author of Sixty Sonnets, All of You on the Good Earth, Caligulan—selected as winner of the 2017 Poets’ Prize—and Last One Out. His fifth book, Storm Swimmer, was selected by Rowan Ricardo Phillips as the winner of the 2022 Vassar Miller Prize and will appear in 2023. Visit him at www.ernesthilbert.com.

Brutem Fulmen

Man is the only creature that is not always killed when struck — all others are killed on the spot; nature doubtless bestows this honour on man because so many animals surpass him in strength. — Pliny the Elder

 

The talk-radio host is provoking listeners to weigh in on what language we believe acts as the official discourse in hell. The host thinks it must be Latin, too many sins, he says, tented under Papal vestments, meaning too many thighs grazed behind the doors of countless sacristies for perdition to be voiced in any tongue other than that of its most zealous arbiters. The callers, on the other hand, are sure it’s English, or Hebrew, or that demons speak all languages, or none, because suffering existed before language, which to me seems the strongest argument, as I shift my car into park up the block from the warehouse you let slip was your last work delivery, last obligation, when you called to say goodbye (a contraction of “God be with ye”). I keep the engine running like Kojak or Columbo, watch you over my trash-strewn dashboard as you load boxes onto a hand truck. I will follow you, stop whatever crime you’re planning against yourself, because I know you’re asking for a savior. On the radio, another long-time listener shares that the word “suffering” comes from Vulgar Latin, a variant of “sufferer,” meaning to “endure,” or to “carry,” and for a moment I resent you. But then I see your truck bumping down the rutted warehouse drive, and I swing into traffic behind you. I keep at least two car-lengths between us. As we twist through rush-hour, the topic has turned from Hell to Heaven. The host believes we have no need for language in the afterlife because God is complete understanding. And while I agree that there’s comfort to be found hiding under the blanket of omniscience, it still makes me want to call in and remind everyone that awareness, God’s or our own, is essential to our suffering. Without it we wouldn’t know we’ve been abandoned. God couldn’t get angry. There’d be no Hell, no reason for it, or for any of our actions, and as the great TV detectives teach us: motive is everything. You jam a quick right, screech your van into a supermarket plaza, and I’m thinking, good, if you want groceries, it means you don’t want to die. Still, I shadow you into the store and calculate our surprise meeting among the vegetables, perform my shock at running into you like this, while you act as if you don’t know I’ve been tailing you since before we both ran that red light.


Keith Kopka is the recipient of the 2019 Tampa Review Prize for his collection of poems, Count Four (University of Tampa Press, 2020). He is also the author of the critical text, Asking a Shadow to Dance: An Introduction to the Practice of Poetry. He is the recipient of the International Award for Excellence from the Books, Publishing & Libraries Research Network, a Senior Editor at Narrative Magazine, and an Assistant Professor at Holy Family University.

The Masterpiece in Our Bedroom

San Girolamo, Caravaggio, 1605

 

In a dark room, San Girolamo writes with a quill pen.

He’s partially draped in a rich, red cloth, maybe a cloak,

maybe the covers from his bed as if he rushed naked

to the table straight from a dream, fevered with ideas.

A thick book on his lap. A thin halo’s edge,

barely visible in the dark, hints above his balding pate

at hallowedness. For all the years I’ve dusted this framed

postcard on our bedroom dresser, that little light remained hidden.

The blessedness I’ve always seen, what gets me

every time —the firm arm of a man reaching for — what?

a word? some truth? Muscled, alive, tendoned. Only the holy

of a bare-shouldered body.

 

Here’s the tableau: the ancient saint stretches without looking

toward an inkwell in shadows — books, cloth, oaken table,

and a blank-faced memento mori.

The man reads. The skull stares.

That hollow head a warning that the world’s fleeting,

the dark and light of afterlife eternal. But, oh, Master,

this is a game. The skull is half hidden, a dull

paperweight, unheeded.  Your model — bright, vital,

glowing with thought.

 

I conjure you whispering

as you paint, a voice escaping time from that museum

postcard on the bureau as my love and I loll in bed —

Listen, before it’s too late. Allow yourselves scarlet

bedclothes, and strong bodies in a glowing room,

and work you want to dive into, and books,

books are good, piles of them to retreat to,

partly naked, after rolling around

half the night with your love, alive, hungry,

eating up this life and one another while you can.


Mary Jo LoBello Jerome, a Bucks County PA Poet Laureate, edited the creative writing prompt book Fire Up the Poems. Recently named poetry co-editor for the Schuylkill Valley Journal, Mary Jo has published poems and stories in many journals. Her chapbook, Torch the Empty Fields, is coming out in 2022.

A Widow Learns About Mars, Molten At Its Core

Even now, is it possible to consider the self-original: the source

from which something arises?

 

Nothing solid after your death, one hour in that loss-space equaled

seven years of earthy life. Grief unoriginal and shocking.

 

Learning that Mars is quiet and seismically stable,

oddly reassuring. The silence inside of me

after you died. My thin, rigid outer layer, my lighter

volatile elements. Maybe,

I was not alone.

 

What trust is required to stay behind,

to hear good luck close by?

 

Like me, my new lover returns from near-empty space where sound

could not be heard, where atoms and molecules could not carry

our voices through air or water.

 

Now faith follows the sound

of our original music, wounded and delighted.


Amy Small-McKinney’s chapbook, One Day I Am A Field, written during Covid after her husband’s death, is forthcoming with Glass Lyre Press. Her second full-length book, Walking Towards Cranes, won the Kithara Book Prize 2016. She was the 2011 Montgomery County Poet Laureate, judged by Chris Bursk. October 2021, she co-taught a workshop with poet Nicole Greaves, Poetry & Aging: Does What We Have to Say Matter? at the virtual Caesura Poetry Festival. Small-McKinney resides in Philadelphia where she was born and raised.

Mama and the Clothesline/Tuckahoe 2001

She bent slowly, grabbin the damp

bedsheet from the laundry basket.

then stood, arms stretched

so nothin touched the ground.

Mama snapped the sheet in the

wind to scare the wrinkles out,

took the splinterin clothespin and

stuck it on the thin line runnin

cross the parkin lot. all our stuff

danced on display but the drawers.

 

We headed back to the basement to

wash the next load and she watched

me run behind her, her brown eyes

soft and laughin. this time, Mama

let me hold the quarters and the

whole buildin could hear me.

skippin and jinglin.


Edythe Rodriguez is a Philly-based poet who studied Africology and creative writing at Temple University. She loves neo-soul, battle rap, and long walks through old poetry journals. She has received fellowships from The Watering Hole, Brooklyn Poets, and Palm Beach Poetry Festival. Her work is a call for aggressive healing and is published in Obsidian, Sonku, Call and Response Journal and Bayou Magazine.

Springtime in Philly: A Mirror Sonnet

                                                                              

(Demeter)

Wake crocuses—push through crumbling asphalt;

purr and croon, slumbering cats curled like snails—

let feral dreams rumble through the sewers.

Snowdrops: root through the frost, unlatch her vault

and show her the way out; read the rock-braille

with fingers deft as mice feet, lithe as worms,

and tunnel to the Market-Frankford line.

She’ll board that train. Wake up, weeping cherries

and forsythias, down rows of brownstones

till the thaw gives way to fluttering vines—

my trademark welcome back sign. Wind: carry

my love notes by sea—fragrant balm of storms,

lilac, and exhaust. If only she would

eat that scent like seeds, undo sleep for good.

 

(Cora)

Eat that scent like seeds, undo sleep for good—

lilac and exhaust—if only I could.

Love notes come by sea in a balm of storms—

my soon-I’ll-be-back signs. They carry me

till the thaw gives way to fluttering vines

and forsythias. Down rows of brownstones,

I’ll board that train, wake up buds of cherries.

I’ll tunnel to the Market-Frankford line—

my fingers deft as mice feet, lithe as worms—

and I’ll feel my way out, read the rock-braille.

Snowdrops root through frost, help unlatch my vault.

My feral dreams rumble through the sewers—

cats uncurling from slumber to croon, wail.

But first, I must push through this crumbling asphalt.


Dawn Manning creates art with words, metal, photography, and other media, in Delco, PA. She is the author of Postcards from the Dead Letter Office (Burlesque Press, 2016). Her poems have appeared in CALYX, Ecotone, Smartish Pace, and other literary publications. She also herds cats for local rescue efforts.

Exit

George Segal, 1975, 2020. Plaster, wood, plastic, metal and electric light.         

Lot of good it did me. Rising before dark.

There was a bench in the woods. I sat on it and waited for Autumn. It came too.

Light (tangelo bruise) brushed the leaves.

The wolf’s head in my satchel. Smells of fresh laundry and evil. Now the

 

Building across the way is burning. And not just that one, but all of them.

The floor feels good under me, cool. Sunlight hacked into fragments.

Shaved, paper-thin layers. I think I used to know the word

 

 

 

 

In Spanish. I’ll wait right

Here, dammit. One day they will

Deliver milk again. I’ll learn the Spanish for thank-you and betray.

 

 

 

 

I’ll step out the door to The End of The World to admire

Eros and the roses I spend so much

 

Time on. The yard, at night,

Illumined with strange light.


Leonard Gontarek is the author of eight books of poems, including The Long Way Home (2021). His poems have appeared in Field, Verse Daily, Fence, American Poetry Review, Joyful Noise: An Anthology of American Spiritual Poetry, and The Best American Poetry (edited by Paul Muldoon). He coordinates Peace/Works, Poetry In Common, Philly Poetry Day, and was Poetry Consultant for Whitman at 200: Art and Democracy. He conducts the poetry workshop: Making Poems That Last.

 

63rd Street: An Ode to Childhood

We wore slap bracelets and pants that swished. Housed somewhere between paradise and Cobbs Creek where the drill teams pounded percussion into our bloodstreams. We’d beg our parents for water ice in the summertime, itching to dangle from monkey bars or play freeze tag. The very mention of water balloon fights threatened the glory of our fresh braids and high-top fades. Yesterday’s blood-dried scrapes were forgotten. We were too preoccupied to notice the wood chips tickling the bottoms of our feet until the walk home. Cricket chirps, lightning bugs and moths prophet us with knowing that the day was well spent. Our teeth became stars of jubilee rivaling the streetlights. These were the days before it mattered that I couldn’t jump double-dutch. My heart hop-scotched to private ideas about rainbows and happy meals. Back then, I harnessed the boon of the present moment. Back then, I could reach for a cloud and give it a name.


Courtney C. Gambrell was born in Philadelphia, PA, where she currently resides. She is a Fellow of The Watering Hole whose poems have appeared in APIARY Magazine, As/Us Journal, For Harriet, Philadelphia Stories, the Healing Verse Philly Poetry Line and elsewhere.

Bewley Road

The tears started welling up as I watched another man drive off with my dog, Bewley. Bud, an elderly man, had come about an hour earlier to meet my dog. For three weeks, I had been meeting people, searching for a new home for Bewley. And while almost everyone seemed interested, I always hesitated. “The only way I’m giving him away is if I know for certain he would be in a better situation,” I’d say to each person. A part of me hoped no good candidate would appear. Then I got a call from Bud. He told me that he was a veteran, long retired, and looking for a new dog because his beloved dog died unexpectedly about a few weeks before. He sounded heartbroken, and as he described his life, I felt a growing discomfort in my heart. I knew that Bud was the one.

***

When Heather, my wife at the time, and I first found Bewley, he was at a local shelter. I spotted him first. He was the only dog that didn’t bark as I walked up and down the row. He had a beautiful coat mixed with dark chocolate, caramel, and white. He appeared about 50lbs, a mix of Chocolate Labrador and Doberman or Rottweiler. There was something regal about the way he stood—as if he were trained as a show dog. But he was not the dog Heather wanted; she wanted “Bubba,” the Shi Tzu in the tiny dog section. Because we’d been looking for our first dog together for months, with several close adoptions, I’d relented and agreed on the tiny dog. The next day, Heather drove alone to the shelter with a new collar for Bubba. By the time she arrived, he was already gone. That’s when she decided it was time to adopt Bewley.

 

Bewley was named after the road of our first residence together. The apartment was one of the few major decisions during our marriage that we instantly agreed on. We walked into the Bewley residence with the landlord, took one look at the built-in glass cabinets, turned to each other, and simultaneously said, “We’ll take it!”

 

I was anxious and nervous the day I picked up Bewley from the shelter. While Heather had grown up with a dog at home, I had not. She grew up in rural, upstate New York in a white middle-class family. I grew up poor in Trenton, the son of Cambodian refugees and once had a stray kitten. So, when my workday was over, I scrambled to get ready for the big moment. I placed garbage bags over the seats of my new car and made an appointment to get Bewley professionally bathed.

 

When I arrived at the shelter, I filled out paperwork and paid the adoption fee. I looked at his biography and was reminded that his temporary name was “Malta,” an awful name for a dog. There wasn’t much known about his history; he was found abandoned in Chester, PA. I was worried he might have experienced some abuse, but he showed no signs of aggression during the times I’d visited him.

 

Getting him home, in retrospect, was easy. As we walked through the pet store, he seemed to love people, and they all adored him. And after his grooming, he smelled and strutted like a winner. I bought him a fancy bed. When Heather got home, she instantly fell in love.

 

We were only in our second year of marriage when we adopted Bewley and still figuring out how to mesh with each other. Our relationship had always had major challenges. During pre-marital counseling, the therapist suggested we reconsider our engagement. We had regular clashes. But we plowed forward, hoping that love would be enough. We were both twenty-seven. Maybe it was that I was graduating and starting my career and felt the pressure to lay down a foundation. Maybe she was tired of living with her older sister and wanted to chart her own path. For many years after we separated, I turned the questions of our marriage over and over like a rosary that I’d hoped would give me a divine answer.

 

The first few weeks with Bewley were extremely difficult for us, particularly me. The expensive bed I bought him lasted only two nights before he chewed out the stuffing. He would try to hump everything in sight, which I found odd. Heather worked long nursing shifts at the hospital three days a week, and, on those days, I would drive home in the middle of my workday to walk him and then head back to campus. It grew increasingly stressful.

 

We decided to crate Bewley. As he adjusted, he’d bark at night. In our tiny rowhouse, that meant he ended up in the basement. He had been so quiet in the kennel—it was one of the main reasons why I liked him. I felt betrayed. I tried to comfort him, even singing to quiet him. One night in the bedroom, while Heather read a magazine on the bed, I brushed Bewley on the floor. I was so frustrated, I blurted, “I don’t know if I can keep doing this.”

 

She came down on the floor and started petting Bewley. “I know,” she said. “I can see you’re trying.”  Her voice cracked. “But if it’s too hard for you, we can take him back.”

 

This felt like one of my first great challenges as a husband. I had made a commitment to Bewley and the thought of quitting on him after one month made me feel like a failure. I’d understood that getting a dog was one of Heather’s non-negotiables when we discussed marriage. There was no guarantee that another dog would be an immediate improvement, and I held out hope that Bewley could be better. “No,” I said softly, “We can’t do that. I’ll find a way to make it work.”

 

The scariest thing about him was his aggression. Typically, he was playful but nondestructive (aside from his beds). But he had this other side. Two things riled him up: certain dogs and men. A veterinarian estimated Bewley was only about two-and-a-half. It was a mystery what kind of treatment he received in his early stages. He could have experienced abuse by other dogs or people and any reminders would retrigger rage and fear. I felt the power of it once when I was walking with Bewley at my side. A man strolled by and Bewley lunged at this man with such ferocity and anger that I thought he would tear the man to shreds. The only things that spared the man were his own reflexes and the length of the leash, which choked the dog as he fell to the ground. I repeatedly apologized as the man walked away with a horrified face.

 

After this and regular dramatic confrontations with other dogs during our daily strolls, I grew committed to changing this behavior. I researched various training programs. The trainer that fascinated me the most was Cesar Millan. I read his work and watched episodes of “The Dog Whisperer” in which he starred and featured dogs far worse than Bewley. I admired Millan’s ability to rehabilitate the fiercest dogs. His simple philosophy of “exercise, discipline, and affection” became my mantra.

 

I started walking Bewley “the Cesar way,” which required strict obedience and a short distance between owner and dog. By controlling Bewley’s head, I’d control his attention and keep it on me. I’d practice starting and stopping, restricting bathroom stops, and having him wait or even submit when another dog walked by. In essence, I was trying to focus on his discipline. And this worked, mostly.

 

Then Heather got pregnant. Two years later, we had a second child.

 

With two kids, a full-time job, and a working wife, being Bewley’s main trainer lost priority for me. I always wanted to be a father—that was my non-negotiable. I delighted in watching Sovi and Asher crack their first smiles, take their first steps, and go through each phase of early life. I had very little time for Bewley. And so did Heather.

 

When we agreed to get a dog, there was this understanding that Heather would be the primary caregiver. She was the dog-lover, after all. However, since Bewley had this aggression I was hell-bent on fixing, I became more involved than planned. Heather enjoyed Bewley, and they had a very different kind of relationship. She was the good-cop; I was the bad-cop. But she didn’t do things I’d assumed she’d do, like groom him regularly. It seemed she loved loving a dog but not caring for a dog, and I started to resent her for it.

 

One breaking point for me occurred when we moved to the suburbs and obtained a real backyard. Early on, I started noticing dog droppings under our holly tree near the fence at the property line of our neighbor. They had two dogs and a concrete yard with a tile pool. They had a habit of letting their dogs do their business until they couldn’t safely walk around it. Only then would they clean up. So, I’d see the dog poop under our tree, look at their yard and conclude: the neighbors were throwing the poop into our yard.

 

“How could the neighbors do that!” I said to Heather.

 

“I know,” she said, “it’s so gross.”

 

It kept happening. Bewildered, I finally decided to confront the neighbors. That got Heather’s attention, and she confessed. Since we now had a yard, she started letting Bewley use it as a bathroom instead of walking him around the neighborhood as we had agreed. I felt betrayed.

 

The new house was outdated, so we went through renovations of the kitchens, ceilings, walls, and floors. I spent many hours pulling out every single nail and staple left over from the carpets I had removed. And when I refinished the floors, I wanted to keep them that way. The great antagonist to my newly surfaced floors, however, were Bewley’s nails.

 

Sovi and Asher were three and one-and-a-half when we moved into the new house. We’d increasingly become worried about Bewley accidentally hurting the kids, so we’d often gate him in another room. He’d spend much of his time away from the rest of the family. The weight of married life with children increasingly sucked much of the joy of owning a dog. And it was increasingly making for a sad and frustrated dog.

 

We kept on plodding along for several months until the day Heather broke. “You need to find him a new home,” she said to me on the phone. “He growled at one of the children. I don’t feel safe with him around them.”  I had recently contemplated that idea myself but was stuck on that commitment I made four years earlier. I never imagined that Heather would be the one to ask for Bewley’s removal. I was sad, but I reconciled that if I could find Bewley a better situation I would do it for everyone’s sake.

***

Bud and I spent about a good hour talking about life, our families, and his experiences with dogs. He looked to be in his late-sixties or early-seventies, tufts of silver hair sticking under his military baseball cap. He had a leather bomber jacket on, and in his hands his own dog leash. It was much longer than the ones I used. “I have a huge property,” he said. “I love taking dogs on long walks and giving them enough slack to let them explore.”  He and Bewley hit it off right away. Bud loved Bewley with the intensity of a man who had recently mourned the death of his own. I felt a peaceful sadness as I handed Bewley over.

 

With my phone, I took a picture of them that is frozen in my mind, of Bud in his black pickup truck with Bewley in shotgun, without any awareness that he was leaving our family forever. Heather was at work that morning; the kids were in daycare. I didn’t even have the heart to tell the kids beforehand. As Bud backed down my driveway, Bewley’s face tilted, as if he was realizing something amiss. When I watched them turn off onto the street, I imagined Bewley jumping out the window and running back toward me.

 

I ran back into the house and wept. I started putting away items in the basement that Bud had declined. I felt Bewley’s presence more than ever before, seeing his head appear in the basement window, and imagining him sleeping in the kids’ beds, which I would have never allowed in real life.

 

It wasn’t until years later that I realized that day was the beginning of the end of my marriage. It became easier to let the seams fray. Surprisingly, Heather was less distraught than I was about Bewley’s departure. Probably I’d made the environment so miserable for her that she simply lost the joy of having a dog. I don’t remember seeing her cry once about him. Likely her goodbye was a slow one that had taken place long before mine. The sad truth is that in the weeks following his departure, we knew we had made the right decision—a great weight had been lifted—and we took comfort in knowing that he was in a better situation.

 

Bud twice brought Bewley over to visit over the following two years. By the second time, Heather and I were living apart. Bewley was almost ten and no longer had his youthful energy. He had silver patches in his coat. Yet he remembered the tricks I taught him, such as standing on two legs and begging for treats. I had memories of taking him for long walks with Heather, when we sometimes would let him off the leash in the middle of the woods and he’d bolt around. Watching him run carefree brought a smile to my face. It was one of those rare moments where I’d let my real affection for him show. I was only good at two of the three pillars of Cesar’s Way: exercise and discipline. I was never so good at affection—with Bewley or Heather. In that way, I failed them both.

 

The last time I saw Bud and Bewley, Bud struggled to walk up my stairs. This was partly why I stopped reaching out to him. I wanted him to stop feeling obligated to me. But over the years, I have thought about both of their advancing ages, and if perhaps Bewley may need my rescue again. I’ve imagined him living with me. And from time to time, I think about reaching out to Bud to see how they are both doing, but I always stop short of sending off a message.


Pol-Paul Pat is currently working on a novel about Cambodian Americans set in the Philadelphia area. He earned his MFA from Penn State University and teaches English composition and creative writing at Delaware County Community College in Media, PA.

Brompton’s Mixture

My grandmother fancied herself a glamorous woman, an old-fashioned movie star, but in fact she weighed seventy-nine pounds and had ropes of veins running up her arms.  She rarely changed out of her front-zip housecoat with crumpled, used tissues in one pocket and a pack of Pall Malls in the other. Her hearing aid squealed on and off as she neared various electric household appliances and she’d grimace as she screwed her fingers into her ear to shift the broadcast channel.

The vestigial efforts she made at grooming were rudimentary.  Each day she brushed her teeth with Comet cleanser to scour the tea stains and cigarette tar off of her teeth.  She wore shiny gold bedroom slippers that slapped her cracked heels when she walked like flip-flops, and she tucked the badly dyed wisps of her hair under a crooked wig.  Her fingernails, though thick and ridged, were always neatly painted.  By me.

I loved her.

My grandmother had terminal pancreatic cancer and was taking longer to die than the doctors had expected. Every day after school and on weekend nights I got to stay with her to make sure she drank her prescribed Brompton’s Mixture and no more. Brompton’s Mixture was a combination of potable morphine, cocaine, whiskey, and honey, invented at the Royal Brompton Hospital in London for the most ill of patients. I had a key to the fridge where it was kept in Dixie cups, and I knew it was important that I kept the key on a string around my neck. I did not know that she had become a morphine addict.

She and I slept in her room in two twin beds, her close to the hallway, and I in the bed by the window.  I was a light sleeper, so I woke when she roused to have a cigarette or to walk the house in the night.  By the time she switched on the bedside table light, grabbed her Pall Malls, smacked the pack against her palm, placed a cigarette between her dried lips and flicked open the metal lighter lid, I was sitting up.

“Go back to bed,” she said, her voice dusky.

“I’m up anyway.”

“You’re too young.  Go back to bed.”  She pulled the flame to the tip of her cigarette, illuminating her face while she drew a deep breath.

“You shouldn’t smoke in bed,” I said, sitting across from her, our pale knees touching in the narrow aisle.  She finished her inhale and held it for a moment, then blew it forcefully to the side, away from me.

“I know.”  Then leveling her gaze, “Don’t you ever let me catch you smoking.”

We had our most peaceful conversations in the middle of the night while she smoked, nylon nightgown hanging off of her bony shoulders, heels tucked up under her.

“You know, I would have slept with Jack Kennedy if he had asked me.”

“Who is Jack Kennedy?” I asked, lying down because she made me.

“Oh, for goodness sake!  What do they teach you in school?” Tap, tap, the ash dropped into the glass ashtray.

“Nothing about a guy called Jack.  Who was he?”

“The president who put the man on the moon.  Honestly.”

“That was John Kennedy,” I said, emphasis on the John.

“Not to me, he wasn’t.” And then as if to herself, “Not to me.”

 

On some nights, I could get her to tell me a story.

“Tell me the story about the Green Dress.”

“I don’t want to tell that story.”

“Tell it.”

“I’ve told you that a million times.”

“Tell me again.”

“Well.”  A pause.  A gathering.   “My mother. Your Great Grandma Crick.  She was a cruel woman.  She made me work in the bakery from four in the morning until four in the afternoon when I was a young girl.  Younger than you.  And she made me sell eggs in the street like we were poor.  And we weren’t poor.  And the boys would tease me and chase me, so I ran.”

She crushed her cigarette, turned out the light and lay down on her side facing me, sliding her hands between her knees.

“Then what happened?” My whisper seemed loud in the stillness of the dark.

“I could run.  You know, like you can run, like the wind.  And I could dance.  All the boys wanted to dance with me.  So one Saturday, there was going to be the big dance.  I kept some of the money I’d earned from the bakery and bought a green dress.  Made with a bodice.  You know.  And silk.  So I laid it out on my bed that morning before I went to the bakery.”  I could hear her breathe.  Slow and even.  Her small body looked like a child’s in the dark.  “When I came home, Great Grandma Crick had taken scissors and cut my dress into a million pieces.”

“Did you go?  To the dance?”  I knew the answer.

“I’ll tell you where I went,” she said.  “I went over to Aunt Rhoda’s house and lived with her.”  She sighed and rolled on her back. “Aunt Rhoda didn’t cut up people’s dresses.”

 

We had some of our most expansive silences as she sat up in bed, left hand pressed into the mattress to support her, right hand holding her cigarette.  I listened for the little bah sound of her lips letting go of the filter, the weighty pause as she held onto the smoke, and the long fffff of her exhale.  Sometimes she stalled, gazing softly into the distance while her ash grew longer and longer, finally dropping unnoticed onto the carpet.

One night the pain struck violently. I was sleeping and I heard her yelling. “Oh-oh!”  She was in her bed in a ball on her side.  She yelled, “Oh!”  Both arms, crossed over her belly, knees up to her nose.  She rocked and yelled.

“Nana!”

“Oh!  Oh!”

“What’s wrong?”  I leaned over her in the dark. She flailed her arms like a blind woman, hitting me in the side of the face.  I ducked and put my hand on her side to reassure.  She grabbed my fingers, grinding bone on bone. Though tiny, she was strong, made of piano wire and gristle. “I am here,” I whispered.  Her eyes were wild and unfocused. She shook her head back and forth. I said, “My hand,” and she let go and rolled onto her side, groaning.

After enough time had passed that I thought she had fallen back to sleep, she got up and ran, doubled over.  I chased her down the three quick steps into the sunken living room and hugged her to the floor.

“I can’t hear!” she shouted.  “Get me my hearing aid!  Get me my hearing aid!!!!”

I told her, “There’s nothing to hear.”

“Get me my hearing aid,” she yelled, so I ran to her bedside, yanked the drawer, snatched the hearing aid and ran back.

She put it in.  It whined.  She jammed it deeper.  I shouted, “Let me do it,” and grabbed her wrist, forcing her arm away from her ear.  We stayed like that, a stalemate, an accidental arm wrestle until I felt the fear and strength drain from her and found myself holding her limp arm aloft, the loose skin gathered around my too firm grasp, her pulse pounding louder beneath my clenched fingertips. I softened my grip and guided her hand to her lap. “I’m going to take it out and fix it,” I told her, breathless, and she turned her face slowly, as though watching a distant bird fly along the horizon, and I realized she was offering me her ear.  I removed the flesh-colored aid and flicked the miniature button to off. “There.” I replaced it. “Better?”  She nodded, pushing it deeper with her fingers.  Breathing heavily, I hugged her to me, pressing my forehead into hers.

 

I had been staying at my grandparents’ home my whole life. My parents had had four children born close together, boom boom boom boom, so my grandparents had moved up the street to help out while my father put himself through night school.  On the weekends, my older brother Drew and I went over to my grandparents’ house so my mother could focus on the babies.  My grandfather, Da, was alive back then, walking around in a pressed white T-shirt, grey Sears trousers with the permanent seam down each leg, and a worn leather belt.  He was a fix-it man when he wasn’t working at the Mill, so he and Drew built and dismantled things with tools while I spent my time with Nana.

My grandmother was bewitching back then, thin when other people’s grandmothers were heavy, modern when other grandmothers were dowdy.  She decorated her house in gold-painted furniture and dressed up every day.  In her bedroom bureau, she had a drawer exclusively for belts and another exclusively for scarves.  Her foot was a size five, which, according to her, was a sign of a delicate and glamorous nature, so her closet held little high-heeled shoes I outgrew in third grade.

I didn’t care that she rarely left the house except for bowling night, or that she only had an eighth-grade education and didn’t like to read.  All I knew was this:  When she asked me what made me happy, I would tell her lots of presents on birthdays and Christmas.  When I asked her what made her happy, she would say, “I’m happy when you’re happy,” and I knew it, in my young heart, to be the truth.

 

The living room clock in my grandmother’s house was imitation gilded gold and rococo, consistent with her fancy but inexpensive taste.  At night, the outside light from the lamppost illuminated the clock face through the large picture window.  On the bad nights, the clock reminded us how long we had to wait until her next dose.

“Well?” my grandmother asked once she stopped worrying her hearing aid.

“An hour and twenty minutes,” I told her as we collected ourselves from the living room floor.  We moved the short distance to the lounge chair that faced the window.  I had inherited her narrow hips so we could sit, side by side, between the cushioned arms.

She reached for her cigarettes and slid the lighter out of the cellophane wrapper.  Her lower leg bounced nervously.

“Are you cold?” I asked.  “Do you need your house coat?”  She flicked the lighter and leaned toward the flame.

“No,” she said out of the corner of her mouth.  A car drove by under the streetlight outside and we both watched its red tail-lights disappear around the curve. “You know,” she said, snapping her lighter shut, “I wanted you to be the flower girl in Debbie’s wedding.”  She dropped her head to the palm of her free hand and began to weep.  “Aunt Ida told me you would be the flower girl.”  Aunt Ida was not my aunt and Debbie was not my cousin, but we always referred to them that way.  Debbie had gotten married nine years earlier.  “She told me you would be.  She said you would be the flower girl.”

“But Nana, you know I never wanted to.” I stroked her bony back, trying to rub the ancient regret away.

“Don’t be silly, every girl wants to be a flower girl.”  She looked at me with watery eyes.

“Not me,” I said.  “Flower girls have to wear dresses,” and she registered the truth, at least for that moment, and looked down.  Digging under her seat cushion, she pulled out some old, crumpled tissues and wiped her eyes.

“You always were such a tomboy,” she said, blowing her nose.  “You know your mother had to write to the school about that.”

“I know.”

“They didn’t like that you wouldn’t wear the dresses, but your mother said, ‘You’re either going to let her wear the pants, or you’re going to see her underwear because she’s always upside down.’”  She elbowed me and smiled through her tears.  “On the monkey bars.  You know.”   She chuckled to herself and looked out the window.  “I wonder what they thought of that note.  Stupid men.”

The living room clock ticked loudly.  I glanced at it.

After a while, she looked down at her diamond rings, heavy, swinging around her bony fingers.  “You know these were Great Grandma Crick’s.”  She twisted one off and handed it to me.  “They bought this one in Atlantic City.  Did I ever tell you that?”

“No,” I said, but I had heard it as well.

“This was the one she got after he beat her up.  Black and blue.  He took her to Atlantic City to make it up to her and bought a cheap diamond ring.  And she took it.”  I tried it on for a moment and felt its uncomfortable heft, then handed it back, placing it in her warm palm.  “That’s right.  Don’t let it touch your skin.  It might burn you.”

I smiled.  She took a drag on her cigarette.  “Horrible woman.”

We both looked at the ticking clock.

Over the next forty-five minutes I watched my grandmother slowly deflate.  Though she had been leaning on me before, I could feel her weight, heavy now, begin to sag and it became an effort to hold myself upright.  Her shoulder jabbed into my ribs and her head rested on my upper arm.  Her fingers hung so loose around her cigarette I worried the butt would drop onto the floor.  My grandmother, wrestling just an hour before, became limp, boneless.  Sleeping, but not.  A glistening strand of saliva stretched from her lower lip to her lap and I snapped it with my finger.

“Let’s go to bed,” I said, kissing her forehead and working my way to face her.  Heaving her up, I tucked my arm under her knees and lifted.  She drooped and slid, light for a person but heavy for her size, her dead weight folding her in half.  I had to stop twice on the short trip to bolster her with my thigh.

She poured off me as I lay her down, immediately curling into a ball, a pill bug.  After covering her with the bedspread, I set my digital watch alarm for 6:30 a.m., her next dose, and lay on my side, facing her.   I slid my hands between my knees and watched as her back rose and fell, rose and fell, rose and fell.

 

“Toast?” I asked her, as she padded into the kitchen only twenty minutes after her Brompton’s, ready for the day in her housecoat, her lips red with lipstick and her wig on straight. I grabbed the bread out of the breadbox and put two slices of Wonder into the toaster.

“Thank you,” she said, leaning to the side to reach for her Pall Malls. She sat in one of the two chrome chairs around the little table. “Did you sleep well?” she asked.

“I did. Did you?”  The casual morning banter.

“Yes,” she explained with a cigarette pinched in one corner of her mouth while she fished in her other pocket for her lighter.

The toast popped and the acrid smell of blackened bread filled the air. I took the stick of butter from the large refrigerator and cut off a chunk.  I never liked the buttering of my grandmother’s toast: pressing cold, hard butter onto crumbling burnt toast.

“What are you going to do today?” she asked as I placed the toast in front of her.

“Hang out with you.”

“Oh, honey.  Don’t waste your time,” she said, “What about a boyfriend?”

“Uch,” I grunted, getting my Cheerios and bowl out of the cupboard.

“Don’t ‘uch’ me.  You’re a beautiful girl.  It’s the only thing I ever wanted; to live to see you married.”   I turned on her.  She waved me away before I could get started.  “It’s wonderful to fall in love.  You deserve that in your life.”  She looked off to the side and sucked on her cigarette, drawing in her cheeks and filling her lungs with smoke to make her point.

The kettle whistled and I filled her teacup, adding a Lipton tea bag and watching the tannin-colored smoke bleed into the water.

“Dad tells me Great Grandpa Crick was no better than Great Grandma Crick.”

“He was a drunk,” she conceded, placing her cigarette in the ashtray between us.  A single plume of white smoke rose straight up then swirled in an invisible air current.  “But he wasn’t cruel like she was.  Your Great Grandma Crick, she was a jealous woman.   If your grandfather hadn’t come along to take me away, I’d probably still be scrubbing pots in the bakery basement.”

“Because you were beautiful.”

“Because I was beautiful,” she agreed.  Old Great Grandma Crick with her bulbous hernia from a lifetime of lifting copper pots, knuckles the size of horse chestnuts and lower eyelids that peeled away from her eyeballs to reveal their pink interior in a way that made me feel as though I were looking at someone’s insides.  She was so ugly.  No wonder there was strife.

“Dad says Great Grandma Crick chased Great Grandpa Crick around the dining room table with a butcher knife,” I announced, angling for some information about family lore I’d heard at home.

“It was a paring knife,” she confirmed, carefully pulling her red lips away from her teeth to take a bite of toast. “But he’s right.  She did.”

“No way.”

“It’s true.”  She set her toast down.

“But why?”  I had been certain the knife story was myth.

“He was an embarrassment,” she said, as though this were obvious. “After he’d get the early morning baking done, he’d go to the bar and get himself drunk.  Then he’d stagger up the street from pole to pole in the middle of the day.  She didn’t like that.”  She zigzagged her hand back and forth, pole-to-pole, pole-to-pole.

“I don’t think I’d like that either,” I said, tipping my bowl to my mouth to drink the milk.

“Oh, she didn’t care that he was drunk.” She flashed disapproval; Nana wasn’t one for bad table manners.  “She just didn’t like that he did it out in the open in the middle of the day.  Great Grandma Crick said it didn’t look good.  She said people would buy their bread from someone whose husband didn’t stagger up the street in broad daylight.  She always worried about appearances.  She always worried about the money.”

“I remember her and her money,” I said, standing. “She had a penny jar in her kitchen cabinet behind the doily drapes. Whenever we went to visit, she would show it to me and say, ‘I’m saving all this for you. It’s our little secret.’”

“Well?” Nana smirked.

“Well what?” I asked.

“Did she ever give it to you?”

“No.”

“There you go,” she said as she stood, stubbing out a perfectly good cigarette.

 

We sat. We talked. We laughed without a care or a glance to the Brompton’s fridge.  After a while, though, she became fatigued and walked to her room, stooped and holding her arm in front of her abdomen as though protecting it.  I followed.

There, I helped her remove her housecoat and sat her on the bed.  She paused to catch her breath, then lay down on her side.  I gently pulled her wig from her head, careful not to pull her hair, and set it on the skull-shaped Styrofoam stand on her dresser, stabbing a single straight pin through the top to keep it in place. I filled her water glass and placed her cigarettes on the night table.  Because it was time, I walked back in the kitchen and removed the string from around my neck, careful not to catch the key in my hair.

The smell was overwhelming to me when I opened the refrigerator.  Brompton’s mixture was musky, strongly alcoholic, viscous, and dark amber in color.  The Dixie cups in which each dose was kept had softened a bit where the liquid had been, as if the contents had been eating away at the internal structure.

I gently grabbed a single cup and closed the door, locking it.  I walked carefully to Nana’s room, holding the cup out in front of me, as though it was precious and toxic, because it was.  When I got to her room, she was cramped up, eyes closed and moaning quietly.   I sat on the edge of her bed and placed my hand on her shoulder.  Her flesh was loose on her bones, warm and familiar.

“I have it,” I said.  She opened her eyes slightly and began to push herself up.  I put the cup on the night table.

“Let me help you,” I said as I reached around her to pull her up to sitting.

“Oh, honey,” she apologized, forehead on my shoulder to prop herself.
“Shhh.”

I took the cup and held it out to her.  She steadied herself on the edge of the bed and then reached.

 

She tossed it back quickly both because it was vile and because she had learned that it would bring her relief within minutes.  My grandmother, who casually chewed Excedrin, shuddered with revulsion at its unmatched bitterness.  She crushed the cup and kept it in her hand as she lay back down, her nightgown twisting around her as she rolled to face away from me.

“Want some water?” I suggested. “It won’t be so nasty.”  She waved it away with the slightest gesture of her hand, so I sat and rubbed her back in circles, waiting quietly for the medicine to numb her body.

Over a period of twenty minutes, she unfurled so slowly that you might not have noticed it if you stared only at her.  But if you looked away for a while, then looked back, you would see that eventually she lay on her back, ringed hand resting gently on her stomach.  I waited until she was still for quite some time before reaching across her for the crumpled Dixie cup that had fallen from her hand onto the mattress. I dropped it into the plastic wastebasket filled with tissues and crushed cups.  I tidied her covers and switched off the light.

I bent to kiss her soft, lined forehead, moments earlier so furrowed in pain, and smelled a rotting whiff of the Brompton’s on her breath.  I grabbed her free hand and kissed the back of it, then rubbed my own kiss off.  Her nails looked good.  I was getting better at the polishing. Her eyes opened just a bit.

“Hey,” I said.  She smiled ever so slightly at me, but she was no longer very present.

“I’ll be back in a bit.  Go to sleep now.”  Her eyes began to fill with water.  I reached across and took a fresh tissue from the box.

“You’re good now,” I said, dabbing.  She reached up and grabbed my arm, squeezing me toward her with a strength I could not believe.

“I love you most of all,” she mouthed.

“I love you most of all,” I said, and watched her eyes slowly close.

And I waited with her there, until her grip loosened completely.


Kathy Smith grew up in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania and earned B.S. in economics at the University of Pennsylvania. She went on to earn an MBA from University of California at Berkeley. Though she still dabbles in finance, her greatest joy is being a mom of three, followed by writing. Her work has appeared in Apiary, and she has won two honorable mention awards from Glimmer Train. She resides in Bryn Mawr with her beloved husband and snoring bulldogs.