Family Inheritances

What we inherit from our families can take many forms—intangible, difficult, or surprising—as you’ll find in our December poems. Frederick Joseph remembers an enduring lesson learned from his grandmother, his “maker of miracles,” in “Making Luxury Out of Flat Soda.” The narrator in Mickie Kennedy’s “Guarding the Coop” battles a tendency for violence passed down from his mother. And in Joseph Bathanti’s “Right Guard,” the author conjures his father’s spirit from a can of deodorant his dad left behind. To hear recordings of the poems, click the Play buttons below.

Take care and listen well,
Nancy Holochwost, Associate Editor

 

Making Luxury Out of Flat Soda
By Frederick Joseph

I learned to breathe in my grandmother’s kitchen
despite life sitting on my chest.
Scent of cast-iron skillet seasoned by sunrises
and ancestors’ touch. Gospels of sizzling grease
and bubbling greens my uncle called hallelujah and amen.
Wallpaper aged like the wrinkled faces of generations
sitting at her table, arguing over cards
and gossiping over cognac. Grandmommy’s kitchen,
where on shattered days, when the world was crumbling,
when she forged forward
with the pennies and dust America gave her,
I learned to fill my lungs with survival.
Grandmommy’s kitchen had soul, but I wished for luxury,
like my classmates’ kitchens, like sitcom kitchens,
like kitchens that fed kids not worried about light bills.
In the aisles of the unwanted, she bought soda gone stale:
labeled with a bargain’s grace, flat as the depleted smile
of penny-pinching resilience. But in her hands,
the deserted became an idea—a diamond for joy’s crown.
In the confines of her humble freezer
that soda surrendered to cold’s gentle grasp.
My maker of miracles—my alchemist—
transforming the unimpressive into glimmers,
gifting me something more than survival.
With a blender whirring a symphony of ingenuity,
flat soda became a slushie—a frost-kissed wonder.
Luxury coaxed from the discarded.
More than a frozen treat, she shared a lesson:
how to breathe in more life than you’ve been given.

 

Guarding the Coop
By Mickie Kennedy

I watch for the fox that’s slaughtered
                                   three Rhode Island Reds, the hens
just lumps of bloodied feathers I buried
                                   before my son and daughter woke this morning.

A blackened poker in my hand, I’m not a man
                                   for guns. Even so, a box of loose buckshot
waits in the basement, passed down
                                   when my father passed on.

Just two chickens left. They recognize me
                                   as the taker of eggs, the bringer of grain.
Their needs are simple—to be fed,
                                   protected. They rush to me

when I dump watermelon rinds in their pen,
                                   dismantling the cool pink edges.
They’ve never seen me dash a butter dish
                                   against the floor. Never seen my trembling

kids picking up the ceramic bits—violence
                                   my inheritance. These days I swallow a pill,
pale as baby aspirin. It keeps me
                                   docile, but it hasn’t fully extinguished

that tug—the wrath my mother raised me with.
                                   I feel it now, scanning every shadow
for a set of canine teeth. Moonlight steals
                                   through the poplars. The hens are oblivious

in their roosts. The fox is nowhere,
                                   smart enough to know what I will do.

 

Right Guard
By Joseph Bathanti

As he aged, my father dwindled,
not in stature—though he grew smaller,
as elders must—but rather in estate.
He never required much,

insisted on giving things away.
What am I going to do with all this?
Suddenly I had his shirt,
wristwatch, hammer, and plane—

his car keys and driver’s license
when the time came. I arrived
hours after his death
and stole a moment alone in his room

at The Pines, a name too green
and pulsing, too filled with trees—
near infuriating—for a tomb.
My mother had died a year earlier.

To save money to pass along to me
and my sister, my father had requested
a move to an efficiency—a monk’s cell.
At heart he was an ascetic.

I sat on the edge of his small bed,
where he’d perched that morning—
September 3,
his fifty-ninth wedding anniversary—

to quell his vertigo,
hands folded, his dawn office
before launching his day.
He witnessed the first rind

of Sabbath sun cross the sash.
Song sparrows chanted “Asperges Me.”
Then, prepared, he rose.
I stood and followed his shade,

gauging where in the modest span
between his bedclothes and coffeepot
he’d decided to join my mother—
privately, no announcement, no illness,

no deathwatch. No priest.
The attention would have embarrassed him.
His only flourish was the white pressed
handkerchief on him at all times.

Perhaps he glimpsed his fetch,
or, responsive to my mother’s whims,
her beckoning;
or his own mother, whom he’d lost

at five to childbirth.
Given neither to signs nor bodement,
never mysterious, but like us all
that parse life step by step,

my father kept a secret life
he alone entered—nothing terrible,
or even curious—a silent chamber
he had the wisdom, the courage,

to leave locked, the key hidden,
though he had little use for metaphor.
A millwright, a steel man,
he discovered the ladled heat

and molten pour, the union shop,
a practice he abided by and died for.
What was left of his to take?
He’d already given me everything.

I wandered into his tiny bathroom.
Stationed on the shelf above the sink
stood a can of Right Guard
Original (of course) Sport,

the only deodorant my dad used:
the logo’s stick figure in full throttle,
bolting from the blocks.
I grabbed it and pressed the actuator.

The valve hissed and hung a familiar
incensed mist. Out of it,
like a genie summoned from its lamp,
appeared my father.