The Fireman’s Daughter Extinguishes One More Fire

 
 
 

The ghosts walk into the kitchen and you cook them. No. Your grandmother and your mother walk into the Sunday kitchen and ask why you haven’t waxed your floor. You wax poetic about bleach and flour and how salt puts out fires. The smoke from your oven is a shade, is your grandmother’s white hair. You don’t ask why.  Your mother has widowed the mountains to visit you on the saddest day of the week.  The bare bulb in the ceiling weeps lemon juice, the lamps in the empty living room have sold their gold. Your lover left you in the middle of the night.  Now nothing glows, not even the oven’s coiled arms. Is it true your grandmother rose from her grave beside the brook without a trace of dirt?  Is it true your mother is not even dead yet? If pie, then man. You fold fear and three egg whites into a bowl of sugar each time you think you hear your lover whisper meringue.

 
 
 

Jill Crammond is a poet/single mom/artist, funding her passion for poetry and feeding her children by teaching art and preschool at an independent school in upstate NY. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and featured in such local community events as Bookmarks: The Memoir Project (Arts Center of the Capital Region), and Write Here: A Mini Conference for Writers (HVWG & Arts Center of the Capital Region). Her poetry has been published in a variety of anthologies and journals, including Fire on Her Tongue (Two Sylvia’s Press), B (Kind of a Hurricane Press), Thirty Days: The Best of the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project’s First Year (Tupelo), Classifieds: An Anthology of Prose Poems, Crab Creek Review, and others.