My grandmother once told me that when going out in public, I represent not just myself, but the whole family.
After supper, stirring leftovers
into her cast iron pot:
ham hock, turnips, onion tops,
greens, okra, carrots
becoming our weekend soup.
A freshman in college,
I tell her about my classes.
She tells me about her mother
during the Depression,
an ignorant woman, she says.
And her mother’s brother,
a wanderer, a songwriter,
who left as a young man
but returned, old, to die,
his poems and stories
on the backs of paper bags.
Wasted words, said her mother,
and another mouth to feed.
Her mother burned them all.
Thick glasses, shoulders hunched,
greying waist-length hair
tucked on top in a bun,
she feels her way through her ordered house.
She stirs coals in the “glow boy” stove,
refills the water pan on top.
She readies my bed every evening,
turns back the hand-stitched quilts,
heavy and warmed.
Bedridden with pneumonia,
four sons at work,
all five daughters come
to rush her to the hospital,
to save her.
She intends to die at home, she says,
and if they don’t agree
they can all just leave.
On the wall in her bedroom
remains a framed picture
cut from a National Geographic:
the winding Burma Road.
by Charles Entrekin
Published in Nimrod, 2017