My Grandmother's Dresses
Laura Sobbott Ross
were fields of calico, hemmed
in stitches as resolute as fence posts.
At night the fabric of her porch screens
held darkness and moth wings,
the melancholy keening of the bayou—
its scrim of algae divining
white perch and moonlight.
The rocking chair kept a rhythm
like a heartbeat. We salted
our apples, dealt old decks of cards,
felt the river sigh at the lip of the levee.
My grandmother reminding me
never to discount prayer or thimbles.
Her fingers worn from mending seams.
Who took down the wash the day she died?
Yards of tiny cotton flowers stirring
the way the starlings in the chimney flue
fluttered from their summer nest
toward a light implausible as a swatch of silk.
September, an opalescent shade of blue,
thread the color of smoke unknotting into wings.
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Laura Sobbott Ross is an architectural designer. She was recently nominated for a 2008 Pushcart Prize, and has poetry published in New Millennium Writings, The Arkansas Review, The White Pelican Review, Kalliope, The Caribbean Writer, and the Baker’s Dozen Literary Review, among several others. She also won first place for poetry in contests for the 2006 Mount Dora, Florida Literary Festival and the Great Blue Beacon.
©
Laura Sobbott Ross