Three Poems

Momento Mori

Her box of whipstitched cardboard open,
lonesome ancestral weft, it allows me to see
Ma in the tall pasture.

We played games with sticks, toys chipped from slate,
burlap sacks, fish like glass, antique marbles,
dogwood chalices, ornate grapes.

On the backyard block Pa cut off chickens’ heads.
Bodies in entrechats around the woodhouse,
their bloody necks spewed.

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