Onna Solomon
HEIRLOOMS
Again this familiar window, again
the bare trees and the dead
grasses along the river’s curve
the day after Thanksgiving.
Doing dishes with my mother
in the quiet after everyone has gone,
she says, Eventually you’ll take this over
handing me her mother’s antique
serving platter. I am terrified by this
clear view of how we inherit. The river,
of course, is beginning to freeze,
winter neatening fall’s confusion.
One summer I had a fling
with a gravedigger. He stole flowers
from the dead and left these foolish
offerings at my door. Every day
he had both feet in someone else’s grave—
I thought of him this spring when
my grandfather died. And still
somehow my grandma smiles,
tells dirty jokes and makes those
ornate Jell-O molds. She married him
at eighteen and lost him at eighty-two.
I wonder how a person learns
to mourn the thing that makes her
who she is. In the next room
the game’s on TV, the players
moving across the surface
of the illuminated screen.
Originally published in MER 24.
Onna Solomon is the author of the poetry chapbook Disorder (Press 34). Her poems have appeared or are
forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Hobart, Hopkins Review, and Iron Horse, among others. Her poem “Autism Suite” was awarded the Beloit Poetry Journal’s Chad Walsh Poetry Prize. She lives in Ann Arbor, MI.