it is after dinner at the old house in lincoln, nebraska
the cream-colored house with a screened-in front porch
you are standing in the kitchen with your grandmother
all five feet two of her washing dishes she’s washing
you’re drying with one of her old red-checked dishcloths
you offered to wash but she said stuff and nonsense
and you know she still doesn’t trust you or anyone else
to wash the dishes clean enough to get that greasy residue
from the pork chops off of her favorite china plates with
pink blossoms outlined around the edge the day-to-day china
but still you’re helping her in the kitchen and your mother is off
somewhere reading to your younger brother and sister and
your father is sitting on the porch of the house
he grew up in watching twilight descend on the august
streets and he brushes a little corn silk off the porch from
the afternoon corn-shucking for tonight’s meal remembering
fondly how many ears he ate and still tasting the sweetness
of their bright bursting buttered beads on his tongue
and as your grandmother with an irish name that your daughter
will say over and over to herself years later reveling in the sound
of it naming characters in her fictional stories with that name
naming her dolls with that name as your grandmother reaches
to you in the humid heat of a summer kitchen to pass you the corn pot
to dry she collapses on the cool of the tiled floor without a sound
and you yelp and the pot rolls toward the door making a horrible
metallic sound toward the door to the porch where your father
sits still relaxing still watching still feeling the blue black of night
spill down slow while humming a tune and patting out a rhythm
he is planning to play on his marimba not knowing yet
no not for another moment that his mother is already rising
into that same twilight sky

Jill Kitchen’s work appears in FERAL: A Journal of Poetry and Art, Naugatuck River Review, and Poems in the Afterglow. She has a B.A. in Romance languages from Colorado College and has studied creative writing at UCLA, Columbia University, The Poetry Project in New York City, and with Hollowdeck Press in Boulder. She lives in Boulder, Colorado where she can be found rollerskating on the creek path while searching for great horned owls. Twitter: @jillkitchen