“Gloss Stand” © Bonnie Matthews Brock

 

The Day My Grandma Died

I dabbed at her lips with a washrag for hours.
Rationally, I knew she would not wake again,
But on the desperate off-chance I was providing a comfort,
I tended to a dry mouth and took no notice of the death rattle.
*Anyway, she always did love an underdog.

Upon distressed request, I took a pair of kitchen scissors and cut two locks right out of her head.
Even in senility, she saw to this silver-spun shade of blonde.
I stopped before cutting myself so much as a strand.
I envisioned her waking and fussing at me for shearing her bald, like a farmside wooly ewe.
*Delivered, of course, with the same smile in her eye that she had when I was five and she was
redecorating. She asked me what color the walls should be, and I said “hot pink and lime green”
because I was five and wholly unqualified to determine such things. But she took my word as
scripture and the walls are that god awful combination to this day.

The part I take no pride in is the intermission of her death,
When I ran as fast as possible to seek solace in a thrift store,
And waited for my pocket to vibrate a conclusive bugle hymn.
Suddenly, it had felt so cruel and voyeuristic to keep whispering platitudes at her.
*Or laying my soul bare in the confession booth of her living grave, telling her how she was right
and that something was wrong. That I was raped and so sorry that I never set up her phone or
called her back as I lay in that rot bucket the whole six months prior.

With no secondhand stones left to turn, I returned to her bed.
And watched the iron fist in her velvet glove get smelted down for crematorium scrap.
I fell to my knees in the front yard and heaved until my mom fed me a benzo,
And I could languish in her arms, in this new and smaller world.
*I change my grandpa’s bedpan in that same room now, where we share the bed sore of her
absence; where our grief is both the termite in the wall and the crusts of his sandwich I cut
away.

Photography © Jennifer Matthews

Photography © Jennifer Matthews

Tabitha Morris: “I am full of love and intensity! I am a mid-twenties, woodland-dwelling Radium Girl who seeks out classically unloveable stuff, loves new wave music, and kicks it in strange places. I like insects and vigilantism and probably have asbestos poisoning from the abandoned fridge company on Commerce. I am back in my hometown and throwing things at the wall to see what sticks!”

Poet/Photographer Jennifer Matthews’ poetry has been published in Nepal by Pen Himalaya and locally by the Wilderness Retreat Writers Organization, Midway Journal, The Somerville Times, Ibbetson Street Press and Boston Girl Guide. Jennifer was nominated for a poetry award by the Cambridge Arts Council for her book of poetry Fairy Tales and Misdemeanors. Her songs have been released nationally and internationally and her photography has been used as covers for a number of Ibbetson Street Press poetry books and has been exhibited at The Middle East Restaurant, 1369 Coffeehouses, Sound Bites Restaurant in Somerville and McLean Hospital.