Roger Nash – p. 113

My Grandmother’s Old-Style Fast Food

You move so fast around the kitchen, knees overtake even toes, ingredients dreamt instantly into your wakeful hands. You move so fast around the kitchen, you leave it quickly far behind, cooking simultaneously in this and other galaxies, shepherd’s pie ready for any part of the top-notch universe, exactly on time for supper, by whatever suns you choose to measure time by. The pie has the fragrance of your voice. It says quite firmly, as pies can do in any galaxy: hunger travels faster than forked lightening. Toes overtake slippers, slippers the floor.

Anna Di Nardo

Anna Di Nardo

Anna Di Nardo

Anna Di Nardo

Beth Gobeil

Who You Might Have Been

There was a nightly ritual, with tea and TV and two small pills. I used to hand them to you, shaken from a brown prescription bottle.

Numb for most of my childhood, they kept you from going away, kept you through the deaths of your mother, father and sister.

Kept you from the insanity of having birthed six children In a seven-year span, in a home with no money a difficult marriage, the disapproval of your parents and most of the neighbors.

The pills kept you at a distance, from everyone, even yourself, kept you all those years, day on day, a life sentence.

You were musical, but the piano, was sold after a of couple years; more noise in a house that was already too loud.

You could sing, your voice, a high and clear soprano, but what was there to sing about?

You were a writer, but I discovered your poems only when you moved after I was grown.

And all these years later I wonder who you might have been apart from two small pills.

Setting the Thermostat

Mom calls today and says in a small tired voice that it is too cold in her apartment and she doesn’t remember how to use that thing on the wall

I try to explain about the dial, how to turn it up for warm and down for cool she sets the phone on the table, comes back, tells me what the red arrow indicates

asks again what she should do about it, I slowly review the instructions she says she thinks she understands; I ask about her visit to my sister’s

whether it had snowed and how she is feeling. Fine she says although her back is bothering her again and I wonder then if maybe warm

isn’t about the setting on a thermostat or the temperature of the air to her so much as cold is absence, the emptiness of rooms and memory.