AN EMPTY GREEN GLASS THORAZINE BOTTLE
His final car wreck is in there. And so is his ardor. I’m a wreck. All he could say in ICU. And so is the prescription against her wasting in the rental bed, the only thing they knew to do for her Parkinson’s. While Mrs. Davidson, the nurse, knitted a mint green sweater for my Barbie, my grandmother twitched and moaned in the TV room.
I saw the bottle again, beached in the antique secretary, just as the family home was closed for good. And because I’m the daughter of a nervous man and strangely stingy mother, I keep things for myself, and know there is a genie in this bottle, the woman I’ve waited for so long in dreams.
The Winter Spell
I’m shamelessly judging other folk’s sagging bookshelves in their Zoom squares. I’m dawdling online watching pickers whine about price hikes at Goodwill. I’m watching prehistoric wings swoop from light blue past my dark aqua sheers, then rise to the cerulean, their shadowy work to scry something about the human heart, that it could be the most shriveled apple to fall out of all this orchard’s ice fruit hanging that will melt whenever Van Morrison sings.
A one-hundred percent cotton flannel shirt gestures from eBay he’ll wait for me, and I take his plaid indigo seriously. He’s 3XXL (54-56), my kind of Appalachian god, two-parts elderberry reduction, one pinch ginseng root, scraped until knuckles bleed O-negative on the box zester into saucer juice, into all the intentions, the prayer for transformation one prays when stuck in medical history cached at the doctor’s Church-of-You’re-Not-Coming-Back-from- That.
Valley
It’s so noisy in here like being underneath a children’s classroom, each desk creating high decibel vibrations scraping floor, only it’s a Burger King on the road to my mother.
One indulgence I ask, that pure memory made when I was a traveling teacher, entering an empty classroom to see marigolds bloomed in paper cups on each small desk.
The sky out the window today is slate, but not clean, awash in sins of the fathers, sky above this secondary route, where the Dixie flag riles the other porches.
Once I drove all the way to her without stopping, because it was one of many ends. How many did she have? All I did was wait, till that was all I am.
Quietly Observed
Step over the knotty roots that have pushed through her driveway, greeting you to trip over with every visit. Like heavy ancestral furniture, or a prayer rug made of wood (hemlock! YEW, or pine?), the family tree came up through layers to meet here, where some of it began.
It slows you to give thought to it, and answers why no one can start over. The exposed roots said so much more than junk up in the attic, or thick air unbreathable in the earth cellar. Nor in those bibles full of snipped, saved hair. You won’t find much fodder there.
Drawing my own conclusions. My grandmother’s dentures, quietly observed in a jar by the bed, sharing the nightstand with a souvenir of Florida barometer, and her book, Tears are for the Living.
Her secret, and when I also heard she had false teeth since she was twenty-five, I knew I’d never know her even old, remembering her laying out cards with oversized numbers on the TV tray for solitaire.
In the picture album she dates handsome lads dressed in Sunday suits on the farmland. Wears a tricorn hat and cape, and under that a long dress of tartan plaid with a saucy fringed sash. She poses in this costume on a prehistoric boulder.
Teeth falling out in dreams is lack of control, dumped into my lap like a bucket of field corn.
Seeing her secret and remembering, I back through my life till I get to the front of it.
I’m Not Evelyn, Susan Hankla’s second book, was released April 2023 from Groundhog Poetry Press, LLC. Clinch River, Susan’s debut poetry collection set in Appalachia, was published by Groundhog Poetry Press LLC. Both books are available through Amazon— reviewed in Blackbird (Spring 2018, Vol. 17, No.1) and Cold Mountain and Hollins Critic. Susan lives in Richmond, VA. Recipient of the Virginia Prize for Fiction, fellowships to VCCA and the Frost Place, she holds a BA from Hollins College and an MFA in creative writing from Brown University.