Economies - Koss
Great Grandma Ella
Thank you for leaving me
your handy longish ape arms,
frog-colored eyes, and buxom cheekbones.
I carry you . . .
I recall your hulking figure
faded sleeveless sack dresses & snow white
cotton strands, your hair “bobbied”
to your temples, and the mysterious ever-bruise
of your cheek, a fallen fruit.
Last week, I hovered over your bodied
leftovers, resting below a mossy stone
just down the road.
And I missed you.
Thank you for not giving me
a birthday sewing machine.
I was filled with dread
each time you threatened
to gift me. At five
I was bewildered, but at seven,
terrified.
I know you didn’t mean
to toss my Mexican jumping beans
the day you babysat and made me
a bologna sandwich with just bread—no condiments.
You were losing your sight, had grown forgetful,
and I was too afraid
to speak. I was like that. I gobbled every bite.
You were Grandpa’s long-armed
double (save for breasts
you later lost), in whose shadow
he was harmless.
He could’ve been your twin.
Mercurial as he was and prone to rage,
when you walked into the room
he became a docile boy again.
We’re all someone’s child
including you, Grandma Ella.
Who was your mother—your pa?
Were they tender to you ever?
And what of your thick-legged,
muscled love, a gentle short man,
that West Virginia logger who relished
your warm tin bucket lunches
in the forest where he floated
trees upstream in the ice-cold winter river?
By the end of his life, his thighs had become blow fish,
blue and huge and shivering,
his last breath spent in your arms,
leaving you a widow
with three young kids.
So many lives bled for money,
West Virginia’s Industrial Revolution,
Allegheny’s ruin, women and men,
mountain people, just struggling to survive.
Did Great-Grandfather speak of Sycamores
rumored to be 45-feet round?
Or the thousand-year oak amputee, whose remains
were frozen beyond the amber lens, its flesh split
by axes, young sons crawling over the piles,
practicing their early deaths?
Y’all knew about destiny and what the mountains
and rivers promised.
And could a woman who cooked meals from nothing
mixed with fat, shoot a buck, ride a horse, and make a thing
grow? A shack is a home is the nighttime moonshine store.
You knew how to run a business.
Your economy was your ‘magination, the thing I also took
from you.
Eventually, you tried to beat destiny by heading north.
Henry Ford’s Detroit, another mean trick.
Your new man and two kids went with you, the other held
down the mountain ‘til she died.
A factory without a union is bodies spent
and no place for a woman they said.
But husband number two
snagged a job on the line, but soon disappeared
after a week-long drunk.
So you cooked, brewed and sewed, did the things
you knew, to keep food on the table
and fire in the pot, but never, ever
did you thrive, nor your kids.
We survive, Ella. We do. And when the trees grow
back, and the auto plants all close,
wind still passes seeds,
the sun continues to glow, and our bones unknow
their significance and rest and rest
Previously published in print by San Pedro River Review, Fall 2022
Koss (she/they/them) is a mixed-race, queer poet, writer, and artist with publications in Chiron Review, Michigan Quarterly (Mixtapes), Cincinnati Review (miCro), Spillway, diode poetry, Five Points, Petrichor, Moonpark Review, Beaver Mag, Sage Cigarettes, Spoon River Poetry Review, MoonPark Review, Gone Lawn, Variant Lit, Anti-Heroin Chic, San Pedro River Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Bending Genres, Bulb Culture Collective, Prelude Magzine, and many others. They have work forthcoming in Reckon Review, Sugar Sugar Salt Lit, Midway Journal, and the anthology, Ovation. Other anthologies include Best Small Fictions 2020, Get Bent, Beyond the Frame, and Punk. They’ve received numerous award nominations and won the 2021 Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry contest and have a chapbook, Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect coming from Diode Editions in '24. Find links to their work at: https://koss-works.com. Connect on Twitter @Koss51209969.
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