My feet are Sicilian
and small
like her tube of red paste
that I pressed against my chapped lips
in my Father’s Mother’s
kitchen after the American Lake
my blood, too, ran
feisty and tangential
My thick thighs and
healthy chest are inherited from her, my Mother’s Mother, who wrapped tiny
hotdogs in butter-cut dough
I remember when she died;
I went to the funeral and sat on a bench of chestnut wood
it was marbled, encased
in a thick shell of see-through resin
The Virginia summer
light was yellow, and hazy, palpable, and early
I cried, not
embarrassed and embarrassed all the same
because the Italian
cousins were mean
and I wished to make
them salted slugs
I remember how it
feels to not remember enough
or
To not have ever
known enough to form a way to remember
See, my grandmothers weren’t
like boulders; instead they floated like an ambiguous fog, surrendering to the
caverns of silhouetted personalities
They lived mostly
in my mind, in a rewind
of a blue storm
streaking the windows of a rainy dusk
and now,
She, with the silver cotton-candy
bob, with crystals, and a pearlescent purple Cadillac
has also died
when I was young, Florencia
Nicole smelled like rainbows and I thought she was famous
when I was young,
Clara Marguerite knew the alkaline secrets to a strange place called the desert
I remember now,
that I am here only
and directly because they were
Their names form the
floral fabric of my own Marguerite Nicole
Their sunsets and pain and successes built the steps for me to taste my own
and They were before
We used to be
three
