1.a. Too-tight shirts

After Grammy Bobby died, my nuclear family descended upon the farmhouse to process her former possessions. Grampy certainly would never gotten around to it. Cleaning was not in his nature.

It began when her arthritis struck a match beneath her knuckle
and her husband unscrewed her nail polish cap. Soon her
doddering hand could no longer land the brush on her nails.

In Sunday School today Miss Hooker said
that we've all got to die sometime and God
alone knows when and when it's time to go
it's time to go, what's waiting is Heaven
or Hell, she says,

Thirty-two.  Skip.  Because the spent heads of sunflowers are downturned in mourning.  Skip.  Because I fall and nearly break my leg on an idea that must defeat me.

Thirty-two.  Skip.  Because sometimes a name is a landmine, and to speak it is to step on one.  And to write it down is to give it an hour that will not burn.

The ripe ones
are sin-bruised,
eager for summer

to swindle each one
to tipsy pulp. But O,
how my husband

reaches for them,