The Time Aunt Ann Drove Down South to the Nursing Home To Tell My Great Aunt Selkie Her Brother Frank Had Died
A poem by Tara Bray The post The Time Aunt Ann Drove Down South to the Nursing Home To Tell My Great Aunt Selkie Her Brother Frank Had Died appeared first on Deep South Magazine.
Black News 
by Tara Bray
Old-old, white-washed, white-crested, her greatness
caged in a world of no one listening,
Sent there to die, but she spent years living on.
Working hard to halt her chewing tic,
and using hands, a few sounds, in spite of lips
tucked in, Selkie raged, banging on her chest,
“Why not me? Why not me?”
I’ve never let this story rest though we hardly
noticed when she died. I imagine her bruised
thin skin, the layers of her slow discoloring,
a body made to live out, not only years,
but every bland and hopeless hour, partitioned off—
no morning air, no sunset, no clover in her hand,
nothing left to praise except the end.
Tara Bray’s work has been published in Poetry, The Southern Review, New England Review, Colorado Review, Narrative Magazine and Shenandoah, among others. Her first book Mistaken For Song was published by Persea Books (2009), and her most recent collection Small Mothers of Fright was published by Louisiana State University Press (2015).
The post The Time Aunt Ann Drove Down South to the Nursing Home To Tell My Great Aunt Selkie Her Brother Frank Had Died appeared first on Deep South Magazine.
