Grandmother’s Hotel
Grandmother’s Hotel
1
Black and white check
hopscotch linoleum
cools my July brown
toes and dirty soles
My 8 year old eyes
fill with the iridescent
heat of hissing gases,
a volcano sound asleep
The mountain man’s
brush wire belly erupts
from a plaid covered peak
a seismic event on a couch
Murmuring of flies swarm
his gapped mouth as if
the vapors stink of rotten
fruit and horse pies
A steamy blanket of
heavy Iowa air mocks
the corner fireplace, a
ridiculous mad joke
2
My brother and I run on
mopped floors, pirates in
search of dead flies, black
against silver dusted sills
“A penny a piece” says my
Grandmother, sometimes it is
a penny for my thoughts,
the flies are easier to find
That summer my grandmother’s
laughter danced, her arms jiggled
“look at my bat wings” she said
with unashamed twinkling eyes
Flickering fireflies, a strawberry
moon, warm voices wafting from
an elbow grease kitchen table
It was a summer to remember
3
Some treasure hunts end
with the sting of defeat,
nothing but a hornet’s nest
and a cousin’s rough hands
holding me tight, puppet
arms move against
my will, tangling strings
of touch and revulsion
The bathroom perfume of
men’s piss poor aim and
drunken remains, burn
my nose with confusion
4
The tattle tale was thrown on
my parents bon fire cheeks
teetering trust trashed in the
hornet droning dumpster
That summer my innocence was
clipped from my rounding back
“look at my broken wings” I said
with feather black fading eyes
Erased memories, a sick buzz
of flies, slender throat burned
with sticky bile breath
It was a summer to forget
Yesterday I wrote this poem as an extra to the Tanka and apparently it was a premonition of today’s prompt because it is indeed a memory of my childhood. So I am moving it over to this blog post and sharing a Haibun in a separate post, a twofer! That’s not cheating is it?
Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt is “we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem in which you recount a childhood memory. Try to incorporate a sense of how that experience indicated to you, even then, something about the person you’d grow up to be”
Source: https://www.napowrimo.net/go/