Third Annual Wild Violet Writing Contest Winners (2005)
Poetry
— Third Place
Sarah
K. French began writing creatively again her during her junior year at
Notre Dame, when she finally recovered emotionally from the abysmal critical
response of her novel, The
Indian Clan,
which she attempted to publish at age 8.
Inas
By Sarah K. French
I was told I would cry at my first funeral.
But my cheeks stayed dry.
Even when I saw hers,
swollen like the over-ripe grapes
I would pluck from the vines weaving her fence.
Her cheeks were smeared with Technicolor rouge
(probably by the embalmer) to hide the
yellow traces, the aftertaste of fluid
injected into her blood
in a half-hearted attempt
to impersonate life.Inas.
My Babysitter.
A title I loathed by the end of her reign,
I was in my Terrible Twelves.
Almost a teenager and certainly not a baby.
Everything offended me then.
Especially when she wanted “sugar”
in front of all my friends.
I never understood why Dad kept paying her
to look after me.I think I know now.
It was because Ed and Inas
were still reusing plastic butter tubs —
from 1993. Or because Ed was at Pearl Harbor
and received a paltry pension each month.
Like he’d forget that oil burns black,
And the sickening smell of singed
human flesh, without a piece
of paper to remind him.
Maybe because her organs
never let her have children of her own.
Or because whenever I took from Inas,
she received. She needed me like I needed her,
when I was five and I would cry.
A tantamount relationship between giving and taking; a love
that a Seventeen subscriber could never understand.Even when I told her “I’m too old” for her to tickle me
between my toes with a washrag after playing outside.
I don’t think she was insulted.
I think she understood it as one of the pains of aging.
Like when she couldn’t sit up in the mornings,
or when she would fall, her skin would peel like
an apple’s under a knife but not bleed.
When you are eighty-six you want to save your blood
for what’s important.
She didn’t deserve to die when I was so selfish.There we were at the funeral, painted
in red and kohl. Mine Maybelline, hers… cheap.
I was so disgusted at myself I looked away.
I can’t believe that the night before,
I wondered how I would look in black!
Or if my cheeks would streak with mascara smears
if I teared up.We never picked her grapes in the summer.
Green and shiny, they left a bitter taste on my tongue.
The November grapes,
frosted white and wrinkled,
were the sweetest. Their juices
aged into syrupy liqueur,
like the honey she spread thick,
over everything we ate.