for Jeanne
beloved friend let us start here
with the boxes beneath the eaves
in a red caftan your garnets promised
by Isaiah in covenant with god
a prayer for our mothers four
are the matriarchs three
the patriarchs two the tablets
left in the PM pill box
one your ram’s horn your bangle
one is your brother’s urn + for what
for the boys to throw it away
for the days to slog
down the stairs with box after box
after we held up a necklace + said this
was a prayer it turned out
somehow you loved her
when you were too small
to talk she held you
years of packing peanuts
filled where she fussed
into wrinkled cantankerousness
turned pillars of garnet into pillars
of salt how to downsize
a half century of motherhood
it’s too much the experts agree
before packing up the camera
before dousing the fire
before slamming the gate
Joey Gould, who served as Sundress Academy for the Arts Spring 2024 Writer in Residence, wrote The Acute Avian Heart (2019, Lily Poetry Review) & Penitent > Arbiter (2022, Lily Poetry Review) Their recent work appears in Meow Meow Pow Pow, Memezine, and Defunkt Magazine’s Surreal Confessional Anthology. They write book reviews as Poetry Editor for Drunk Monkeys, and have also placed reviews in Glass: A Journal of Poetry and the Sundress blog. Joey writes on location at cool-sounding places like Skunk’s Misery, Mount Desert, and Half Moon Beach.
