Matchstick thin a girl
with a jug too burning hot to hold
stumbles
and the field of berries holds its blue breath
as she and the jug
fall soundless
on the shoulderwide path of matted-down
footsteps.
Cracked, cracked to pieces
the jug
flashes its boiled water
over her mother,
who had stifled the wail of birthing
muffled the first squawks
first chirps of rose-pink life,
now this
now this
her mother scalded to death.
A girl
and a wet wrinkled baby.
No milk
no movement, nothing.
•
That was the telling,
my grandmother fleeing.
A sepia memory
mildewed, perhaps, or not
the telling, as if a coin lifted from a box at the back
of the bottommost drawer in the darkest
most airless corner of the shadedrawn room
her telling
told to no one but me
and that time only
as she pulled two blueberry muffins
from the bakery bag
and set them and a knife on the plate.
•
A memory, over and not
like the song about the song
that never ends.
•
A girl, not here, not there,
stopped in what becomes forever
dead center
and fuels the nights of her sleep.
•
Had I known, I could have told her
no one dies from a jug
of boiled water.
Denise Bergman is the author of five poetry books: The Shape of the Keyhole (2021), Three Hands None, A Woman in Pieces Crossed a Sea, The Telling, and Seeing Annie Sullivan. All are book-length poems. She edited City River of Voices, an anthology of urban poetry.
