Lena Moses-Schmitt
The Story
From the kitchen radio’s reporter, murmurs of bees: attracted to palm wine,
hoards gather to the suds,
quiet their wings, revel & drown in the buckets of foam
fermenting. My sister calls drunk to report
her latest heartbreak, a man a dozen years older.
Her voice thin & reedy through the line.
Listening, I turn the radio low & dash
the last of my wine down the sink, aluminum blushing
beneath the burgundy
sediment over the plant
―remnants of last week’s tomato―now sprouting
from the drain’s dark throat like an arm
clinging to the edge of a pool. I want not to kill
this odd sort of lift;
this willingness to save oneself.
Maybe he’s not ready,
my sister is saying, to depend on someone else.
She pauses.
The radio drones on.
We are not close,
she & I. But still she explains over & over
why he could have left,
how his infant nephew suffocated in the puddle
of his mother’s skirt, floral bucket of shallow fabric
spread between her knees
as she sang him to sleep, melody drowsy
with painkillers, worrying his fine hair between finger & thumb.
Blame lends us something to cling to,
in this way. So that it makes sense to my sister why she is alone,
sprawled on the carpet next to her couch.
Phone’s warmth
pulsing on her collarbone. Where am I going to go,
she asks & because I have no answer I briefly go down
into the dregs with her, strangers,
& into this silence the radio still speaks, all the way
from Ghana, on this same story of alcohol
drawn from tree sap―
. . . though some bees manage to wake up & fly away―
as the closing music rises.
Lena Moses-Schmitt is an MFA candidate in poetry at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she is the Levis Fellow for the coordination of the Levis Reading Prize and the associate editor emeritus of Blackbird. Her work has appeared in The Paris-American and Superstition Review, and she was a finalist for Crab Orchard Review’s 2013 Rafael Torch Literary Nonfiction Award.
Return to September 2013 Edition
From the kitchen radio’s reporter, murmurs of bees: attracted to palm wine,
hoards gather to the suds,
quiet their wings, revel & drown in the buckets of foam
fermenting. My sister calls drunk to report
her latest heartbreak, a man a dozen years older.
Her voice thin & reedy through the line.
Listening, I turn the radio low & dash
the last of my wine down the sink, aluminum blushing
beneath the burgundy
sediment over the plant
―remnants of last week’s tomato―now sprouting
from the drain’s dark throat like an arm
clinging to the edge of a pool. I want not to kill
this odd sort of lift;
this willingness to save oneself.
Maybe he’s not ready,
my sister is saying, to depend on someone else.
She pauses.
The radio drones on.
We are not close,
she & I. But still she explains over & over
why he could have left,
how his infant nephew suffocated in the puddle
of his mother’s skirt, floral bucket of shallow fabric
spread between her knees
as she sang him to sleep, melody drowsy
with painkillers, worrying his fine hair between finger & thumb.
Blame lends us something to cling to,
in this way. So that it makes sense to my sister why she is alone,
sprawled on the carpet next to her couch.
Phone’s warmth
pulsing on her collarbone. Where am I going to go,
she asks & because I have no answer I briefly go down
into the dregs with her, strangers,
& into this silence the radio still speaks, all the way
from Ghana, on this same story of alcohol
drawn from tree sap―
. . . though some bees manage to wake up & fly away―
as the closing music rises.
Lena Moses-Schmitt is an MFA candidate in poetry at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she is the Levis Fellow for the coordination of the Levis Reading Prize and the associate editor emeritus of Blackbird. Her work has appeared in The Paris-American and Superstition Review, and she was a finalist for Crab Orchard Review’s 2013 Rafael Torch Literary Nonfiction Award.
Return to September 2013 Edition