Shirley

Snakery ( cont’d ) , or Here in Eden I saw it—the tail end disappearing up into the crack where the porch ceiling meets the wall. Now Creepy was in the house, in the void space above our downstairs bedroom. I scurried into the room and made noises and threw my husband’s slipper at the ceiling. Fat chance of that helping any. Next came the day of the loud encounter, when Local Grandboy Age 12 was here. Our dog was rooting at the small wood pile on the porch, not noisily, but then Grandboy and I took heed. Finally we saw it—or anyhow, a snake. It slid into the dark corner and coiled. Buster wouldn’t let up. He kept hounding and hounding, until—oh! We scrammed.   By then, Grandboy’s mother was here and he had to depart on other business. Later I sent her a message for him and a still from my video . See that shooting-out tongue (or whatever that is)? After I took Buster in the house he started up his barking again and there was the snake’s head at the door glass, peeking thro...

Hot Morning Think back in disbelief, your pregnancies in summer and no fans. Swollen you lay flat on cold linoleum where you rented or sat chilly in the tub. Were you that poor or nuts? Your babies exponented now and body drained to empty, struck with déjà vu, no, worse, you guess it never got this hot. The fans, the fans. Point them head-on at dried eyeballs, whirring wildly. Slat all the window blinds to upward, aim the air up to the ceiling where upstairs it’s baking, for a heat shield like those capsules come from space and coming down in flames. Just stay down here. Down here and wet your hair until it drips and put on garbing if you must. Must is better, come to think, to keep your flesh from rubbing, clamming up. Go for shapeless breathing thin, all wild and gaping. Forget the slip, who sees, who cares. Desperate times and desperate measures, cottonsheet your grainy itchy sofa, now you have a place to live. Unlike those who’ve cement highways going past, not some darkling gre...

To Grandgirl Going Out Into the World   I wonder if you know this brilliant thing you did. I guess so. You always have reasons. Over on the wall, I mean—your sewn petals, and behind, the bold duns and greens, rose peach, that spotty purple, on up into cobalt firmament. Blues like that? For real? Here the sky beyond my drawn-up legs, past the glass, shows only palest white, unglorious. And down below, my own coneflowers, Echinacea, spreading now in patches, bloom more a pink, not that beet shade. I think you made yours off on purpose. (My legs drawn up , I said. D rawn . I wasn’t even thinking. Not penciled painted. Just pulled up, bent, the way I’m wont to sit.)  My outside flowers, were I to pull some? Take them to that hijab girl, remember, who brought me jewels? Hard as she is on learning, I would press on her the wording, make her twist her tongue enough behind her thin bright line of lipstick. Echinacea p urpur e a . Eh ki NAY sha. Say the same s-h  as in su...

Framed-Art Tour, Exhibit 18   Youngest Grandgirl still loves dressing up, loves flouncing around in my poor scarves and drop ping them everywhere . Recently, though, when she was here again, I switched tactics and simply got her to stuff them into a bag. I was done harping and harping at her to put them back where they belonged. Much easier. Just stuff stuff. But unlike any ragtag scarf in my possession, the robe she has on in this photo from last fall, my junk-store steal, is more hers than mine by rights. S he’s the one with markings like those high-coiffed ladies’ on the sleeves, not I . I’m more at home in my battered old red-flannel thing with handy pockets. Th e gold-painted lettering running down the front, she says, is kanji— Japanese . Or, s ome is kanji. Those are Japanese ladies, she says, not Chinese. Even so, I’m mystified. I can’t tell what is what. I perceive the fine points in the pictures only vaguely, as other hemispheric, blinded as I am by my paro...

I’m telling you—these Instagrammers, the way they catch me up. First Economikat , and now Iléna. I t must be the glasses. All the puff pastry recipes , though, not just her puff hair , Iléna has me worried. A person can’t subsist on puff pastry. Also I don’t get her egg salad . There’s no reason to be using a blender! In effect, e gg salad is just deviled eggs without the deviling—no having to scoop the y ellows from the whites, m ush with a fork, mix in the mayo, and fit the tedious tiny mound s back into the hole s . If you want egg salad, all’s to do is chop the whole, boiled eggs and add the mayo. Except y ou might want to say stuffed eggs, if devil isn’t a word you want coming out of your mouth and attracting the demons. I used to think along those lines, myself. S o I can sympathize. The d emons and devils, drifting in their netherworld, always shadowed us. We just couldn’t see them. We couldn’t read about them in the news. Evil somewhat hid its face. ...

When the Marbles Go My husband tells me somebody just died. He saw it in the newspaper. No, I say, that man died way back. I know this—we skipped the funeral. Whoever was supposed to send in the obituary just procrastinated. Another day, home from town, my husband tells me he locked himself out of the car. He had to borrow a screwdriver from someone to get into the spare key’s secret compartment he installed a long time ago, at some vague spot on the car’s undercarriage. “Uh-huh,” I say. I never liked that hiding place. I can never remember where it is. “It’s time you found somewhere better, not so complicated,” I say. He says, “Oh, I can just keep a screwdriver in the car.” I say, “No, then you’ll lock the screwdriver in, too.” Ho-ney . And then out in the garden, when he’s pointing out all the wonderful new life—the strung-out, brave lettuces, the ridges for the sweet potatoes he’ll plant, the raspberry canes’ new-fledged leaves—I see a strange, small plot by the garden’s edge...