East Canton, Ohio
My grandmother’s house
remains gray, remains past
what might be recalled of it.
A boy and a girl play Yahtzee!
in the kitchen on a Sunday
afternoon, and from the car
I wonder if anything of her
remains inside, if thirty years
can make a woman disappear.
A strand of hair tucked
into a floorboard, a fingernail
in an obscure bathroom space.
That would be all—for the rest
we’d need the magnifying glass
that was her father’s,
that helped him read St. Luke,
that helped him build
the grandfather clock
that lost the hour when I left
for college and gave it back
when I came home.
By the morning of her funeral,
they’d already repainted
her front door white
and her kitchen walls the color
of a sparrow landing
on a sideyard, no color at all.
CARL BOON lives in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in American literature at 9 Eylül University. His poems appear in dozens of magazines, including The Maine Review and Posit. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Boon is currently editing a volume on food in American literature.
Twitter: @hiway61carl
Featured image: Frederick H. Evans, “In the Attics,” Kelmscott Manor Photographs, 1896, Purchase, David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1968, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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