Poem: Genevieve

Genevieve

In the kitchen, Grandma was a turbine

smooth and powerful

quietly churning out beds of

baked beans

under a jacket of brown sugar and bacon

vats of potato salad that

appeared out of nowhere

roast turkey that fell to pieces in your mouth and

bright orange slices of vegetable candy –

the only cooked carrots that I could ever enjoy

It would never come from her lips but

someone

told me, as a young wife

she cooked for entire logging camps in Alaska

which explains the leftovers.

She was considered unusually cool

for a grandmother

because she drove a red Mustang

was a single mom with a kid my age

and blessed with seven granddaughters could

shop with the best of them

When they asked me where I got the

polyurethane New Wave pseudo-military

wedge lapel jacket with the

wicked Dance Machine Michael Jackson angles

I would smile

slide the moss green zipper half way up and

relish my answer

“She was born in Alaska, you know.

And she invented divorce.”

One Christmastime we passed around

a frayed black and white photo

some time in the ‘30s

a young whip-smart June, already burdened

seated on a chair with her husband on her lap

a dark-haired bush pilot looking

wild, out of balance

staring at the camera with my uncle’s eyes

one foot already out the door

But even with all this knowledge

I may never have known her

may never have delved very far beneath the

layers of Seward toughness

and Indiana stoic

It took nothing less than

my mother’s death

to finally bring it out of her

seated beside me at the kitchen table

the evening after the funeral

her admission a string of

chopped-up words

through a gush of unwelcome tears

“Mike. This should never happen.

A mother should never have to

see her children die.”

In our lives, Grandma was a white blood cell

equipped with enzymes that could sense the damage and

rush her there to heal the wound

to fill the gap

to sit the kids

Now she has become the wound itself

and we part from this Indiana graveside

on diminished limbs

and skyward breath.

First published in The Montserrat Review

(San Jose, California)

From the collection Great Showtunes of the American Stage  
Photo by MJV