My grandma looks down at her shrimp dinner,
A frown creasing her entire face, drawing everything together in thought.
Without looking at him, she mentions to my dad,
“I think, when they make marijuana legal, I’d like to try it.”
At 84, she has earned a joint.
She has lost parts of herself to cancer.
She has buried her first child & her only husband.
My dad jokes that she will outlive us all.
Immortality is a sick gift, a frayed laugh—
and yet his jokes are not just joke.
His smile fades into something honest,
some dusted memory flickering to life.
During my dad’s childhood, she performed magic.
Old tenants of the house greeting him in the bathroom mirror,
men with crisp suits and no faces holding court in the living room,
a scream drawing all the family out of their rooms and into confusion.
(I know this only from his memories,
but I have seen the color of truth in his eyes.
It is the same shade as fear.)
I like to imagine her then:
Her hands, gnarled root grinding powder
with the same mortar & pestle she flattened the tamale maiz.
Her voice, a rasping hex, small at first--
her grass greener than the neighbors,
her pecans tripping out of the trees at the ripe time--
then growing larger—
her life elongated,
her son home first.
Later, he says, she buried the old books,
traded hexes for hymns,
hung a picture of Jesus in every room, kissed it each morning.
I don’t know why.
Perhaps the fear of whatever was conjured.
Perhaps she grew to love it.
Love is only fear we become familiar with.
We could let it consume us.
Or we bury it in the backyard, replace it with some other man’s face.
2087
snowghoul
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