South Street Dream
In the dream, my grandmother comes running across the field from her house,
calls us out from sleep to see some kind of
rare night sky, maybe something about the moon or a passing
meteor. She is in the middle of the street and
her unavoidable voice calls us out
into the night road with her,
arm sweeping sky, reaching like headlights across town.
Looking up until our faces are moons
under the swollen amber street lights, she asks if
I remember when I was 10 and afraid of flooding.
Water had poured down and covered the country, an unending falling sheet
and Katrina, the hurricane in the south,
was in all of our mouths.
The fear wasn’t of gone, it was of rising and torrent and
continuing. I nod and
although she is already dead,
she is wearing her lilac shirt and gives herself an insulin shot and
is not eternal.
In the dream, she makes me spit terror out into her palm,
lets it fall limp and glistening in the middle of the road –
not a passing meteor, but a constant
dead thing, silver gills still wet from the flood.
Face bent to sky, she laughs
and laughs and laughs, turns,
walks home.
• • •
On Saying Goodbye to a House
You find yourself tracing a path room to room
trying to somehow occupy them all at once.
You wake in the middle of dark morning, in salty sheets,
to that stretch of water that unfolds around the porch,
pulling at your seams. Windows hold you against the full width
of sky. Years slip away and it is still morning.
How to inhabit that hour,
when the space hanging between you and the day is thin and falling silk,
how to hold the last smudges of night,
the quiet that is
already moving.
A clothespin that has not strayed from where you left it last August
mocks all that has not been touched,
pins the pale fabric of your girlhood
from the sky. Playing cards softened by hands and
hands. How many feet on this blue stool, reaching for a salad bowl on the shelf?
You touch as much of the wooden kitchen table as you can, palms lingering.
Stillness knocks against your gut with every slam of the screen door,
the morning sounds that weave a net
you can wrap yourself in.
There are ugly things you have seen all your life that you now feel the urge to swallow or steal.
A chip of linoleum tile, the door knob that falls out into your hand when turned.
Mouth resting parted on the stiff pillow, a loose kiss with the salt and years and night all present,
you taste it, the thing tangled in you,
as if it changes the leaving.
Your mouth knows residue, knows what is gone.
It swallows anyways, the night,
the brine it leaves when it dissolves on your tongue,
the whirring of the box fan.
These things sit like a hook in you.
• • •
Gracie Kinsey grew up in the hilltowns of Western Massachusetts, against a backdrop of cow fields and milkweed, farmers and artists. She studied English at Smith College, has been published in the Eastern Iowa Review, and is currently pursuing her Master’s in Social Work. She lives in Denver, CO, with her partner and dog, Haku. She writes whenever she can.