Storage
There is a piled-high-to-the-ceiling storage locker in the Detroit suburbs where I’ve locked up the things I know from our marriage but no longer need. Old bourbon boxes, Sterilite tubs of all sizes, bursting shopping bags hold it all. It’s not the expired half-box of tapioca or those other brown paper bags he gave me from the trunk of our Prius with junk mail, chipped bowls he never liked, and an old unopened jar of tahini. I used to seek his favorite dark chocolate and raspberry combinations, drive to Michigan every summer, and remember the birthdays and anniversaries of people who don’t speak to me anymore.
What I longed for then repels me now, but I can still get a jolt of pain sometimes, a sudden paper cut or splinter unexpectedly as I unpack it all. I wish I could at least sell some of it at a yard sale or in a consignment shop – to have it be worth something. I know his shoe size, that he doesn’t like salmon, potatoes or too much black pepper, that he reads social theory on vacation, and that he can’t nap. It’s not like I want to put the info in a shiny gift box to give to his next lover. It’s more like I want it all to have some lasting value – like childhood scars that are still visible on adult skin – a topography delineating why/how/who I am.
Tell Them
If people ask you,
tell them that I mean it
every sound that stamps my tongue
silent vowels, unstressed words, consonants
voiced and voiceless all the same
Tell them in an octave that used to know
a quaver, but rarely tremors now
the fault lines in another state
aftershocks distilled to weightless air
Tell them that the hurricanes
of my grieving have turned to gritty rage
still powerful enough to topple trees
but without tears, mold or waves
Tell them that I love the persimmon,
the burnt sienna of fading starless skies
that our suspended secrets hide at dusk
swallowed by the ebony empty night
Tell them come for dinner
or for dessert and wine
I won’t scrub and mop and clean
but they are welcome all the same
Matrilineal
You cannot stitch the breath
-Naomi Shihab Nye
My grandmother was a villainess
of mathematical and pedagogical proportions
of farmhouse fights
wild Appaloosa horses
and hay loft chigger bites.
Whole coolers of marbled meat
frozen in white paper –
bovine branches of olives
in the trunk as my family escaped prematurely,
Dad’s foot heavy on the gas pedal
I weighed less than the smallest weights at the gym at first
then often tried to be smaller as I grew
squinting in the sunshine
soundlessly reading
or embroidering leaves and vines on pillowcases
performing good-girl-ness for decades
until I just couldn’t do it anymore
and began to stitch my own pattern,
gathering twigs and thread, building a nest
My own mother is a wounded swift
unable to take full flight
or heal her broken wing
There are nonstop doings in her days –
yet when she is calmly perching
on the sewing machine chair
she sings her grandmother’s stitching song
with lips spreading into a smile
hemming polka dot curtains
for me – her divorcee daughter in the city
our wings mending enough to imagine more
She and I wrap ourselves in homemade quilts
that familial fingers crafted, created
my eyes painfully parched, numb and thirsting
as we swallow pretzel-topped Jello
balancing soggy paper plates on our knees
the yellow-wallpapered room overheats in the sun,
and distant storm clouds threaten to burst
after the matriarchal malefactor,
my grandmother,
reluctantly remembered
in a country church
is buried deep under Missouri dirt.
Ellen Skilton is a professor of education whose creative writing has appeared in The Dewdrop, Dissident Voice, and The Dillydoun Review. She is an excellent napper, a chocolate snob, a swimmer, and lives in Philadelphia with a dog named Zoomer, a cat named Katniss and some lovely humans.