Making Apple Sauce with my Dead Grandmother
I dig her up and plop her down in a wicker chair.
She's going to make apple sauce and I'm going to get
drunk.
She's cutting worms out of the small green apples from
the back
yard
and I'm opening up a bottle. It erects like a tower
in the city of my mouth.
The way she makes apple sauce it has ragged
strips of skin and spreads thickly over toast.
It's infamous; eating it is as close to God as I'm going
to get,
but I don't tell her. There's a dishtowel wrapped around
her head
to keep her jaw from falling slack--
Everything hurts.
But I don't tell her that either. I have to stand at the
callbox
and see what words I can squeeze in. I'm getting
worried.
If I dig her up and put her down in the wicker
chair
I'd better be ready for the rest of the family
to make a fuss. I better bring her back right.
The whole house smells of cinnamon and dust.
We don't speak. She's piling the worms up in a bowl
and throwing them back into the yard.
by Bianca Stone
About this poem:
"What you don't realize about elegies, until someone
you love dies, is that the reality of loss is fleeting. It then becomes
something imaginary in your mind; a horror story you're addicted to. I approach
the elegy trying to understand the moment they ceased to be in this world; the
difference between the two realities. It creates a third: that delicious and
devastating, invented garden that is poetry." — Bianca Stone
Courtesy poets.org
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