It's no secret you'll feel better if you cry

   


It's no secret you'll feel better if you cry


Memory, like your 78s, crackles with use: this scene finds you, grampa, in the old kitchen again. At the harvest table, you roll unfiltered Player's to the big baritone of Vaughn Monroe, survey the room spread with grama's works-in-progress. Dough toughens on the cutting board; supper's leathers waiting to be torn in strips and dropped in hot beef gravy. Stacks of starched and ironed sheets white against a blue colander of nectarines, black plums, a freckled brown banana. On the windowsill, your deaf long-haired Heathcliff still twitches his stump of tail over the crowded sideboard. He guards the antique crockery and sniffs at canisters filled with sugar, coffee, rice. You sit merry in a mess of mail and double-salted licorice and croon along with Johnny Ray so let your hair down and go ahead and cry.



It's no secret you'll feel better if you cry
by Nashira Dernesch


NOTES:

Appeared in the chapbook,
It's no secret you'll feel better
May 2007.