Immigrant

for Anna Swiezy, my Bohemian grandmother

She shored in Baltimore,
ten years old, reckoning
streets bricked in gold.
Instead, linoleum cabbage roses
flowered and smelled of urine
in every room
she ever lived in.
Days, she labored
candy factories and glass works.
Nights, she learned shorthand,
scheming to barter for indoor plumbing,
oranges, silk stockings.

At twenty-five she moved Midwest
and married a game warden,
prompt in his brown uniform.
She wrote stories and answered
contest jingles. They always
voted Democrat. Early on
his heart deadlocked,
left her in the widow bed.
Palsy stung her feeble,
her mouth brooking saliva,
her legs slow. On the chiffarobe,
Christ was thorn-rimmed,
thin and dark, draped
in glass bead rosaries.
Mornings, she typed,
piling up manuscript like counterfeit,
the story of the new world,
toilets, factories, suffragettes.

:: Patricia Henley, Back Roads (1996)

Spinster

She stored the old country
In a cedar box: folded quilts,
Stiff, brown-tinted photographs of plump children
With a solemn wet-nurse. Her shrewd eyes
Refused to shrink, to be female, shy.
Pride seamed her taffeta,
held the table’s oilcloth straight,
nurtured African violets ledging
dining room windows. At twenty-two
she denied her only suitor and said
she didn’t like the way he walked.
No man unlocked her camisole.
She did for others: stretching
washed crocheted curtains
on pine frames in the drying sun,
pinching creamy yeast dough
into braids and buns. Afternoons,
her hearing aid turned down,
she rocked before TV, her rosary
pooled between her knees.

:: Patricia Henley, Back Roads (1996)