“It didn’t flare like tissue or burn to ash but hovered many minutes …”

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After the Wake, Gramma Ruth Communes with Her Beloved

1.

“There in a jar, emptied of buttons —

mama put a butterfly

–

after she flew it inside a warm oven.

It didn’t flare like tissue or burn to ash

–

but hovered many minutes before falling

heavy toward the rack, wings

–

the color of peacocks, green & black dots,

spotted head & looped proboscis.

–

I’d wanted to stroke it, I think, the day

I laid mama to rest, legs like bent sticks

–

perfect with bristling stillness

as if sealed in a gift shop paperweight.

–

When I tilted it toward the rim — foot-caught

then sprung — it lurched

–

as if alive again, then dust-ruined, stained

the linoleum. I scoured the oven

–

needing to rid it of all the lost wishes

baked into birthday cakes devoured since.

–

Mama taught me thrift, how not to want.

Each year she lit an extra candle for luck.

–

2.

“Remember when we met — I wore a pea

green dress, my hair sprayed with Aqua Net.

–

Mama had no pearls to lend me

& I’d taken down the hem myself.

–

In the throes of summer, beyond the baby oaks,

your caged tomatoes still grow, although no one

–

tends them. How you hated those store-bought pink discs,

refusing also mushrooms in your meat sauce

–

because you don’t pay money for fungus!

It’s gone now, the hutch you made for the chickens,

–

wood latch grooved with your thumbprint,

wire mesh dented where you leaned against it.

–

Oh, Russ, you could fix anything

except the kitchen clock always did run slow.

–

I’d be sifting flour for pound cake,

you’d be hollerin Ruth, c’mon let’s go

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and I’d rush flour-coated, hair falling in wisps,

get on a good dress, shoes, hose, my coat

–

hung in the hall closet like forever,

you in the car fuming we’re going to be late

–

for heaven’s sake, the cake half-risen on the counter.

–

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Ellen Kombiyil is the author of Histories of the Future Perfect (2015), and a micro chapbook, Avalanche Tunnel (2016). Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in DIALOGIST, The Moth, New Ohio Review, North American Review, and The Offing. She is a two-time winner of the Mary M. Fay Poetry Award from Hunter College, a recipient of an Academy of American Poets college prize, and was awarded the Nancy Dean Medieval Prize for an essay on the acoustic quality of Chaucer’s poetics. She is a founder of The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, a mentorship-model press publishing emerging poets from India and the diaspora.