Gray Day

It’s Thanksgiving and I’m entertaining ghosts:

 

Uncle Seth drunkenly carving a turkey, 

one eye on his old beat-up TV set.  

Aunt Florence screaming at my shrieking, circling cousins, 

mashing potatoes with one hand, draining turnips with the other. 

  

My Baptist grandmother threatening to leave, doesn't need a ride home, will walk,

just found out wine is going to be served with dinner.   

She probably would, strengthened by the enormity of her moral rectitude, 

except her house is five miles down the road and it’s bitching cold. 

I never thought I would miss them, but I do today, 

just a little. 

We were alive then and our little circle of purgatory enfolded by a gray and silver world,

 by tapestries of black branches, by winter birds.   

We had dreams.

Big Words

Armageddon stretches out

a long judgmental arm,

Geddon!  Geddon!

Little Babylon!

Darwinian canticle of embryonic destinations,

Frankensteins in farthingales,

Geddon!  Geddon!

Gesthemene’s gossoon,

His howling hallelujahs

Kaleidoscopic meditations,

Salvation’s tintinnabulations,

Geddon!  Geddon!

Green Stamps

S&H Green Stamps were trading stamps popular in the United States from the 1930s until the late 1980s. They were distributed as part of a rewards program operated by the Sperry & Hutchinson company. During the 1960s, the rewards catalog printed by the company was the largest publication in the United States and the company issued three times as many stamps as the U.S. Postal Service.  Customers received stamps at the checkout counters of supermarkets, department stores, and gasoline stations that could be redeemed for products in the catalog.

Scratching at the back of my mind

all those green stamps Aunt Florence saved,

a hundred books enough for something good

who had so little.

They were stolen, an inside job,

Her oldest daughter, is what she thought.

So hurt.  The only time I saw her anything but angry.

Green stamps I saved as a teenage bride

In Norman, Oklahoma.

Enough for an attaché case for my husband

to take to work who was having nooners with a long, tall

woman who lived nearby.

Green stamp rewards did not rekindle passion,

as I had hoped.

Green stamps I took that first time

shopping with my new love

He gave them back.

“No green stamps,” he said,

“Never take green stamps.”

After his mother died inside a garage,

The motor running,

He found a box of green stamp books,

Hundreds, each stamp licked and put in place,

Enough for something really, really good,

Her life work, he said.

Never get green stamps,

You can’t depend on green stamps.