Issue 36: 2002 Poetry Contest

More than Blood
(for Grandmommy)

Peculiar how toilets flushing chuckle the way she did
when she was being girlish or water
swirls down the sink like slap-happy dogs seeking shelter.

The bathroom is the only room you always leave feeling better
than when you entered she used to say. My front door gusts
open and it's the screen door of her summer cottage, gush of her

silk enfolding me. Later, in steam surging from a fissured
sweet potato, I swear I feel on my cheek her quick kiss.
How daisies and wild oats leap into traffic when I pass an old

station wagon bulging with singing boys and balloons. My
birthday and she's driving me "overtown," over the river bridge
to the party at the lake where she trusts an afternoon of tuna

and inner tubes will soothe the sting of thirteen. At four,
she yanked my penis from the light socket where I was attempting
to illumine my pallid world. She filled the lack with the long

light of summer with the lunches on the patio overlooking
the silver ribbon of the Susquehanna, the dumbwaiter grumbling
down with deviled eggs and strawberries.

The world was a pebble, then, even and round. One evening,
we sat in the cricket-rich grasses, the moon cheek to cheek
with the river. And I felt her blood flow into mine—

this surrogate mother who adopted my mother—as the sun flows
into all its offspring, bypassing the scar tissue of breeding.
Yet even with all these embraces, the lighthouse out my salt-

streaked window throbs its single-minded plea. The fog drifts
in the way the lace billowed when her soul escaped—
look of old stone in her eyes.

And sometimes 'round fringes of clover, I can almost see
the loneliness of the rain.

Duane Tucker
2002 Passager Poet

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