Asbury Park<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Another day goes down
\non the old house I am lucky
\nenough to live in. On the radio a voice
\nremembers a farm house and suddenly
\nI do too, a farm house where written words
\nhad no taker, no easy place to pile in corners
\nor at the sides of beds. This was the place
\nof Russian grandparents who could neither
\nread nor write. How odd, now, to save
\ntheir house with words.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s the corner for the parakeet cage, hung tall
\nas from a floor lamp, fluttering racket, bird let loose
\nto flap in your hair. Long table for beer bottles,
\npumpernickel bread, head cheese, duck\u2019s blood
\nsoup, horseradish. The kitchen burned with pepper.
\nSun blaze of Michigan summer through
\nthe tall windows. Beets from the garden,
\nbootlegger renter in the basement.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s the gas stove where my long hair caught fire.
\nFirst the burning smell, then the knowledge.
\nHair singed, brittle, broken by the kitchen towel
\nmy grandmother grabbed me with. Let loose
\nthe bird. It never made a mess like this.<\/p>\n
Or a mess like the day the bootlegger threw
\nthe mash out in the yard where the ducks
\nfound it, ate it, fell down drunk, were assumed
\ndead and plucked by my grandmother.
\nThey woozed back to life about the time
\ngrandpa came home, bleary from having
\na few beers himself, and found the ducks naked,
\ncurving through the yard.<\/p>\n
Long before I came along, destined
\nto catch fire in the kitchen, my father shot
\npheasants from the attic window, the same
\nattic where, on his way to being able
\nto fix anything, he took his mother\u2019s sewing
\nmachine apart, was spanked hard for his curiosity,
\nthen he put it all back together and started
\nthe treadle whirring for the next
\ntwenty years. Out back along the tracks
\nin the tall weeds my 4\u201911\u201d grandma once waited in the dark,
\nbig stick in hand, waited for the man who said
\nher sons had stolen his apples. Watch him try
\nto get home, drunk as a duck, as she waylays him,
\ntells him don\u2019t you ever say it again and he never does.<\/p>\n
I have not abandoned this house, even after
\nI moved away, the grandparents died and the house
\nsold. It is mine, jealously, even after new people
\nbought it, burned it down for the insurance,
\nleft it to become flame and fragment. It is mine,
\nobsessively. I\u2019ll never let the bootlegger out of
\nthe basement. I keep my grandmother always
\nclimbing her footstool to reach the tall white cabinets.
\nMy grandfather is forever walking home
\nalong the railroad tracks that edge Asbury Park,
\ncoal in his pockets, apples in his lunch pail,
\nsuspenders carving an X into his back.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Linda Andrews’ <\/a>poetry and stories have been featured in numerous journals and reviews including Calyx, Nimrod, Spindrift,<\/a> Poetry Northwest, <\/a>Crab Creek Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, CutBank, Willow Springs,<\/a> Midwest Quarterly, Gadfly,<\/a><\/em>and Seattle Review.<\/a> <\/em> A book of her poems, Escape of the Bird Women,<\/a> <\/em>was published by Blue Begonia Press<\/a> in 1998 and received a Washington State Governor’s Writers Award the following year. She is the recipient of a Ucross Foundation Fellowship residency, an Artist Trust fellowship grant, a Vernon M. Spence Poetry Prize, and an Academy of American Poets Prize through the University of Washington. Andrews holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Michigan State University and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Washington. For breadwinning purposes, she has worked as a speech writer, co-author and editor for non-profit health care executives in Seattle. In this capacity, she has been published in The New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of Health Care Resources, American Pharmacy<\/em> and others. She is currently on the faculty of Walla Walla Community College and teaches writing and literature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Asbury Park Another day goes down on the old house I am lucky enough to live in. On the radio a voice remembers a farm house and suddenly I do too, a farm house where written words had no … Continue reading