"Fourth of July last year" by Brennan Burnside
Fourth of July last year
My mother was buried in the hospital, folded up
with her family’s dishes, placed in the storage room
where she grew weight and time hung off her like
a drying rack.
In the middle of last June, I was walking in a neighborhood
that smelled like dryer lint and grass clippings and I saw
a shrine to her driven into the backyard of some unsuspecting
folk: a clothesline with linens loosely draped over a thin blue
twine sutured into blanched wooden stakes. An old man smoking
by the back porch, Coke-bottle lenses with greasy sunlight,
calling to his wife in a dialect of age.
I saw my mother in her new form: less of a spirit and more
of an ambience of objects compelled to behave differently
in her space. It was a dry, breathless summer, but
the linens never shed their dampness. There was
no breeze and the linens fluttered over their
immobile shadows. Something was, ever so
slightly, expressing rebellion, speaking to
the absences presiding within
the moment, revealing
the crowd of absences surrounding me.
What the old man had been saying to his wife was Why
she hadn’t used the dryer?, but she wouldn’t have been able
to answer him except to say that she’d felt inspired
to bring things outside. She felt inspired
to narrow the distance between
objects eons apart.
Most of this I have imagined because I fill in the cracks surrounding me,
where nothing has been defined there is an island of pre-possession and
I sometimes take it upon myself to lead orphans by the collar and
give them a name.
Then, I release them because I am uncomfortable
with too much space and they now roam freely
over unmarked graves, sanctifying them with
hope or at least blowing air into a brightly-colored
balloon.
