Why didn’t he say she could count to one hundred
when she was two or that she plunged
into love again in her late fifties,
and days before she died, confessed to feeling
she was always letting someone down?
Why didn’t he tell about the night her dad left,
and how she climbed onto a chair to reach
the phone, begging him please to come home.
Or the cold November dawn
she stepped onto the back patio
and found her brother dead, his blood
still dripping from the azalea hedge.
Not one word about those things,
only this: In recent weeks, he said,
she’d begun swiping dinner napkins
from the dining room and hoarding them
in her room in Memory Care. As if
a dozen filched linen napkins
made my cousin Elaine a child of God.
Dannye Powell
A journalist and a poet, Dannye Powell's fifth collection, "In the Sunroom with Raymond Carver," won her the 2020 Roanoke Chowan Award for the best book of poetry by a North Carolinian that year. She is also the author of craft interviews with Southern writers, which includes interviews with Eudora Welty and William Styron.
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