When it would rain,
though only gently,
Carol would open
a can of beets, and
suck from the nub
of a blunted Gerber
something nostalgia
and resonance
needlessly
sweetened. It
was, however,
a readymade mood
for Carol, who
knew now, well
as her knees knew, hitherto,
but to un-
buckle if struck
in a very particular
place. She’d
many of these small,
readymade moods, like
pickles distilled in a gurgling cistern,
bobbing around as
swollen koi left
propped atop bent
whirligig pins
and needles. She
was, after all of the
70s, always and ever
an out-of-work seamstress,
baring a grave and arthritic trace
of that old carpal-tunnel
cramped under a
wrist brace. Swore,
she did, that Charlie Manson’d
chased her down, adorned in a
curlicue carrot-top clown wig. Named
her daughter Cassandra, only
aware, as the stilted koi were aware
of a hailstorm, how much sense that made,
that she, who perhaps with a word, would
mince twixt planes of being far easier still than
you and I were prone to breathing,
reeling, dandling ticklish
heartbeats—Carol
swore up and down
all the dry-rotted beds
of the lost canals still snugly
snagged at the teeth of the gum-green
Eau Gallie causeway,
that we were native american. Gran-daddy’d
found himself an island woman
while bridging the keys together. Her
grandmother’s grandmother’d hailed
from Nassau. Carol just needed a cause
for a pause between urn after urn of that
gassing-off coffee she’d cannonball down
with a chain of wet Marlboro Golds you’d short-
leash a whale with. My mother and
Carol aren’t talking. She’d moved from
Indian Harbor Beach to Jellico, Tennessee
or Joplin, Missouri or what scarce scraps of
knock-kneed Brigadoon she’d drawn from her
fourteenth sagging smoke that morning—My mother
refuses to speak of it, save for the same
smug readymade phrase she commonly
scours her glistening sink with: Carol could raise you
up, though, just as much, just usher you over
the bluff again—Carol. I walked through the
rain this morning, reeking of beets that
nostalgia and
resonance
needlessly
sweetened, and
dwelled in her wry little ritual, memories
maybe imagined or real, and thought
if the blood-clotted stories I’d
teased to a life, to a patchwork shroud I’d fill
to fill the time or scare off my niece’s
children,
eating a beet in a gentle drizzle might
sidle my soles up out the shoals of what
wry-necked aquarium koi pond I’d dare
deign to baptize all of the world with,
clothes soaked, God blushing red as a festering
beet—and the rains retreating in envy. Know,
it’s important to note
that I think I see gleams
of her cigarette cherry beaming
daily, orange of a sheepshanked
cluster of hot plates passed for a
kerosene camping lantern
gleaned from the Indiatlantic
Dollar Tree—one she’d kept
like an old guava duff that had
staled to these wheezing
anemone plies of
cheesecloth rising
to seam-rip a stormcloud.
