Issue 13
Rock
PJ Nights
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10 Ballard Street
The first owners of my childhood home
came down with the walls in a game
of pick-up sticks -- piles of laths amidst
billowing plaster dust. One room remodeled
every summer, each year yielded
a broken sleigh bell or a tea-stained
beaded purse, Frankie's report cards,
and newspapers faded to butter.
Musty artifacts resurrected a family
of ghosts. Those nights I'd lie awake
worrying about death. I'd anguish, too,
over my father's disbelief in God,
spend my dimes on inspirational books
at yard sales and cart home pamphlets
from Sunday School to aid in his salvation.
Yet my own faith included no certainty
that death was more than nothingness
and nonexistence horrified me.
So I listened to Frankie; the squirrels
in the walls were his whispers,
the tapping of branches on windowpanes,
his carefree steps. He'd survived
a hundred years, imprisoned in a wall,
and here he was with me, a boy made real
by an urchin's scrawl on paper scraps.
Later, we found a granite headstone
propping up one corner of the house.
No names, no dates, just the carving
of a lamb -- a child's grave marker --
blank as if this child had cheated death.
~PJ Nights
PJ Nights is the senior poetry editor of Mipo. Her poems have been published in various zines and journals including the print anthology Language of Prejudice. Website. Email.
© 2003 by PJ Nights. All Rights Reserved.
© Copyright 2003 by Cayuse Press. All Rights Reserved.