Sometimes the dead are closer than the living.

Nothing stops Grandma from flinging her arms around me
and leaving poppy-seed kisses on my cheek.
Nothing stopped her husband from beating her senseless.
And nothing stopped my mother and her little brother
from finding his empty whiskey bottles under the bed.
But Grandma doesn’t tell me this.
It all comes out after mother’s death, in yellowed letters
that rustle and whisper like dry flower petals.

With me, Grandma’s all ripe plums for a crusty pie.
She cheers my world-wide travels in a little red wagon,
yet promises she’ll never let me go.
Sometimes she bows her gray head and weeps into the dishwater
while mother shouts that she was a bad parent.
Grandma never argues back.
She’s guilty guilty guilty, and she tells me so.
To comfort herself, she prays to Jesus and buys us jelly doughnuts.

Grandma also survived her alcoholic sister,
her mother’s tuberculosis, and my parents’ tuberculosis,
all of which gave birth to my mother’s beautiful brilliant sorrow.
She’s my dead mother now, so she’s also growing closer.
She opens my bedroom door, lost and confused,
and I still imagine I can help her. But how can anybody help?
And if I do, will she give me what I want?
I want to walk into a room and be loved the way Grandma loved me.

How many dead shadows must I swallow before I can believe
in the mute promise of the tender, thirsty morning rain?