Pandora's Daughters
/Jennifer Lynn Krohn
Inside you shatter the colored glass bottles
I’ve collected these past 5 years.
The neighbors watch from their porches
as I nail our door shut.
You shout words like hoarder and clutter
and learn to let something go!
Next, I’ll board up the windows. I wonder
when your anger will quiet
enough for you to hear my hammer turn
this home into another one
of my curios. The first time my heart broke
I’d told Jimmy
I liked him. He squealed, Eww!
Gross! jumped off the swings.
He avoided me for the rest of 3rd grade.
Mother gave me
a jewelry box and told me to let it collect
all my tears, my sorrows,
then to shut it up and never open it again.
Every heartbreak, she gave me
lockets, Tupperware, empty mint tins, and bottles.
When my dog ran
into the street and was hit by a red Ford truck
my mother emptied out
the toy box. I screamed into it until I lost my voice.
When my father left,
she took the photo albums and the quilts
from her hope chest.
For a week we sat over it and wept and yelled
and cursed. Sorrow
is like a gas. It takes the shape of its container.
But if you let it out,
it’ll expand until it fills a house, a street, a city,
a county, a state.
Left unchecked it could swallow the galaxy.
That’s why I yelled
at you to not open my grandmother’s black
lacquer boxes. Why
you’re not allowed in my aunt’s garage or
my mother’s basement.
Sometimes one must lose a room to grief,
or it will press
against you from all sides. Lungs collapse.
Bones buckle. I’m sorry, love.
My life is a collection of heartbreaks, none
as great as you.
Author’s Note: “Pandora’s Daughters” originally started life as a fantasy short story where an actual descendant of Pandora was trying to trap all the misery and woe in a box. While the story didn’t work out, I found the image of someone literally compartmentalizing their grief evocative and decided to explore that in more depth in the poem.
Jennifer Lynn Krohn (she/her) was born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She currently teaches English at Central New Mexico Community College. She has published work in The Pinch, Storm Cellar, Pleiades, and Necessary Fiction among others.
