Danse Macabre, Mississippi: My Great-Grandmother Fires a BB Gun
There were black-eyed Susans loose at the hip, the limp magnolia
blooms worked
to a quiver. There were white necks
of her Belgian hens sent cracking. The day Baby Grace died
from strep throat, my great-grandmother
chased her son into their magnolia’s
manic tier, fired
lead pellets at the soles of his loafers. That day she lay
her bouquet-patterned
wedding china in their zucchini patch and stamped.
There were bare
feet in her garden, as her garden grew
gardenia-struck teeth—flung shards. My grandfather’s lungs
pulsed like a monarch
on a stone. He smoked
for fifty years, became a shrink. From the tree
he heard her shelling pistachios—the sound like someone’s back teeth
ground through nightmare. There were pistachios
gone brittle, blue at the lip. His mother,
pacing, craved salt as her daughter
cooled under the quilt. There were faceless Dutch girls
in patterns on the quilt, swallowed by bonnets, each one
spaced out from the others, as if lost
in so many separate snowfields. There were voids around each one
the shape of the distance between
a boy in the top of a magnolia and his mother’s salty
breath over her bb gun. There were tranquilizers so heavy
for years, her tongue
kept thrusting. Grandfather, it must
never have been still.
-Anna Journey
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