What I Already Knew
Laurie Junkins
for Nellie Ackerman
On the pond bank in watered sun
my grandmother threaded a slow-twisting worm
on my fishhook with her farm-wife hands.
I caught a bluegill, hauled it flopping and blank-eyed
onto the damp grass. She worked it free,
stringed it on a stick through panting gills.
Later it lay on a blue-flowered plate,
stripped of face and tail, fins and innards,
turned to breaded filets with a side of ketchup.
Afternoons, I twisted belly-down in the backyard swing
while she picked marionberries for pie
in double-knit slacks and rubber boots.
Nights tucked into the sagging guest room bed,
I paged through her yellowed romance paperbacks,
imagined myself in an empire dress, clutched
to the chest of a fire-eyed rake.
But then in adolescent years I had time only
for movies with friends, sweaty school dances,
imagined myself clutched to the chest
of the dark-eyed boy in chemistry class.
I didn’t believe my mother that morning
when she said Grandma had died in her sleep.
I spent the funeral in my room listening
to Pink Floyd and catching my tears
in a pillow. “You’re selfish,” my mother said
afterward, standing in my doorway in a black
silk dress and heels. Telling me what I already knew.
Laurie Junkins
holds an MFA in poetry from Northwest Institute of Literary Arts
(Whidbey Writer’s Workshop.) She has most recently been published
in Poet Lore, Rattle, Alehouse, and Literary Mama, among
others. She has work forthcoming in Spillway, as well as
Nimrod International Journal as a semi-finalist in the Pablo
Neruda Prize for Poetry, and she is Managing Poetry Editor of Los
Angeles Review. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and three
children.