Once she was the only colored cook
behind the counter at Woolworth.
Now she heats up empty frying pans,
her thoughts so scrambled that they don’t turn over easy.
She clings to the scrap quilt my mama gave her.
Perhaps it reminds her of time.
Once she wore new suits from Joskey’s,
chocolate nylon pantyhose,
two inch square-toed “chu’ch” heels
and hats that reached toward Heaven
like the holy hands of the “sistuhs” on her pew.
Now she wears urine soaked adult diapers
and the green “I lost my mind in Vegas” shirt
my cousin gave her last July.
Once she captivated young neighbors gathered on her porch
with her accounts of war with Arkansas rattlesnakes.
She’d entangle them in the wiry stories of her youth
just as wild ivies had once entangled her in the fields she played in.
Now she grows tales from the seeds of hallucination.
Once she potty trained us,
ran our bathwater and cleaned our ears with Epsom salt.
Now she cannot find her way along the corridors of her own temple.
We run her bathwater,
soak her disjointed memories in our tears
and shift the tracks of our tone in attempts to re-rail her train of thought.
Once she dreamed of seeing all her grandchildren
graduate with college degrees.
Now there are so many degrees of separation between lucid moments
that her grandchildren cannot travel the circumference.
Once she was my salvation from my parents.
Now she sits in a paisley chair,
puzzled by her return to the womb.
Yet sometimes, in the purple of morning,
she stands,
alerted by the sound of my keys in the door,
and asks, Kookalocha, would you like some Malt-o-Meal?
And I know,
somewhere,
Granny’s spark is eternal.
About Sean Johnson
