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Joyce Kiefer | Rocking ChairMy feet didn’t touch the ground when I sat
in the rocking chair on my mother’s lap
Creak, crack creak, crack
Did it creak in Spanish when her mother sat there,
comforting her or telling a story?
Creak, crack creak, crack
Would the words behind words of my grandmother
become my words, hovering like guardian angels
with dark shadows at their heels?
“Sleep little one, here comes the Old One”
Or tales of those who failed to offer hospitality
Aesop’s fables and Proverbs made comfortable in repetition,
walls of order when earthquakes shook.
The way things should be
and should not be,
You know this, yes?
Creak, crack creak, crack
My mother tells me these stories.
She makes the chair face the balcony door.
The sun bursts the hills into sprays of poppies.
“Wouldn’t it be nice just to run up there?”
She tells me her shoes are too tight.
Creak, crack creak, crack
My dad painted the chair pearl gray
like all the doors in our house,
over the turquoise blue.
I have that chair and will repaint it gray.
I am, after all, my father’s daughter.
But I, like he, will leave the blue
On the underside of the seat that held me up,
The part that no one sees.
Creak, crack, creak, crack
It was the color I chose for her coffin.
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