Did I Bury You too Quickly, Mother?
Caught in the Klieg lights of the next-door supermarket,
I feel red-handed, a scab
set up as the new you
in your home rooting through your stuff
dividing dumpster from donations.
Inside your dresser, you and I beam at each other
in perfect backyard understanding
in a photo, 1988, you didn’t frame,
There’s “Ann’s Ramblings”!
spiral bound, buried
under my college journals;
but all blank, thinned . . .
Perfect to record the oil tank levels,
reading from the backyard dipstick,
I convert inches to gallons.
Shall I lay into the bathroom closet
fresh shelf paper, sorting buttons from tacks,
needles from nails, in the thimble spillover
from your sewing box into my makeshift tool box?
Maybe I’ll wait while the house holds its breath.
In that silence, only the tocks sway,
I cannot be here alone.
Then I stumble upon
two back-of-the-shelf bottles, eaux de cologne
–1970s Jean Nate and 1950s Elizabeth Arden–.
We are turned to vinegar and water.
• • •
A graduate of Vassar College, Sharon Kennedy-Nolle received an MFA from the Writers’ Workshop as well as a doctoral degree in nineteenth-century American literature from the University of Iowa. She also holds MAs from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and New York University. Chosen as the 2020 Chapbook Editor’s Pick by Variant Literature Press, Black Wick: Selected Elegies was published in 2021. She won the New Ohio Review’s 2021 creative writing contest. Her full-length manuscript, Black Wick: The Collected Elegies was a 2021 finalist for the Black Lawrence Press’s St. Lawrence Book Award. Appointed the Poet Laureate of Sullivan County for 2022-2023, she lives and teaches in New York. She previously appeared in BoomerLitMag in 2020.