The Bookstore

PLACES OF ORIGIN

They let you eat cake on White Pond Road

First, like all the other cousins, here’s a child’s thin slice being served on my grandparents’ piazza. It’s called a whole sheet, ordered from a bakery, a flavorless yellow sponge, white frosted, a garden of bright blue roses planted on top for this family reunion.

While cousins play hide and seek in the yard, while aunts and uncles sit reuniting, the half-eaten sheet wants more. I make trip after trip across the piazza in front of all the mothers and fathers and grandparents, helping myself, plating slab after slab in my hand, to the yard, melting every leftover rose on my tongue, caring so much for a cake everyone has forgotten, I feel queasy and crawl with my ache, my rose blue lips, onto my mother’s lap where it takes too long for the effects to wear off.

One thing I’d like answered about White Pond Road

is why my grandfather calls his hot glassed-in porch without screens a piazza.

A nice surprise you can find at White Pond Road

is how a French twist untwists into hair falling all the way down the middle of my grandmother’s back like a girl’s after she puts on her bathrobe before going to bed .

A mystery of White Pond Road

is, where is the pond?

Instead of carpet at White Pond Road

you have floor called linoleum, it bubbles in uneven hills under your cold feet on the way to the bathroom at the bottom of the stairs when your parents leave you overnight, and you have to go alone so you won’t wet the bed you share with your sisters in the spare room of the attic.

When you’re trying to leave White Pond Road

Thanksgiving’s the only day you can come in and go out through the front door, so you have to stand on your tiptoes. This helps you see out the window of the kitchen. You can see onto the piazza and keep your eyes glued on the storm door. Pretty soon your grandfather says maybe your mother’s not coming at all, maybe she’s leaving you here for good, and your grandmother says, now Jim, it’s not nice to tease her, and the way he’s smiling makes your stomach do a somersault, like you swallowed a squirrel, so even after the storm door opens and lets you go, it takes a long time for the effects to wear off.

MILKWEED, LATE DECEMBER

You are a seed
one, in particular

I am empty
of milk, a weed

wintering husk
a country, you belonged

August was sun sealed
my pouch, your plenty

November is blown –

you are fastened
to ruin, so what

if you waste your one
your only