Two Poems: Shannon Moran
the good the bad and the ugly When the cancer spreads like wind-vaulted sand through my grandfather’s brain, he quiets—a semicolon. My grandmother picks up where he leaves off, paying bills and watering scorched brown grass. Every day after school, my mother and I visit their house. My grandfather lies on one overstuffed blue couch, and I, the other, while we watch the country western movie channel for hours. Here, Clint Eastwood, rough and stoic, keeps the natural order of good and bad in check. Here, Clint is strong and unkillable. When my grandfather was nine, a dump truck ran over the smallness of his body in the streets of Baltimore. The priest who came to administer his last rites entered the hospital room and threw up. Doctors took his skin off and rearranged it, told my great grandmother not to hope too hard. Then one day he rose from the bed and walked. The scars on his arm from the skin graft are leathered like Clint is from days in the sun chasing gold. And while Clint runs and fights and evades tumbleweeds, my mother and her mother sit a few feet away and talk too loudly about insurance and money and diagnoses and not hoping too hard. This time, my grandfather does not get up and walk. I want to cover his ears. I want to check my phone to see if a boy has texted me back. I don’t always understand the movies and I hate the way my grandfather’s head has started to cave in like a horror movie prosthetic. I am fifteen and confused about how my life has so suddenly become this small closet of death, but I recognize how hard it must be to die in the middle of an open concept living room, so
S H A N NON MOR A N
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I give my grandfather quiet. He gives me the pretend that his brain isn’t walking him down a one-way road. We watch Clint live through one duel and then another. We watch together and separately. The bills stack up. The hospice nurse arrives again. I wet his lips with a sponge dipped in ice water. We all cry only when we’re alone. But the country western movie channel keeps playing our movies and the Man With No Name keeps drawing his gun. And in this house the four of us stand, small shapes balancing on an uneven grave, noose around our necks, waiting for that hawkeyed gunman to fire the final bullet and sever the only rope holding us here.
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T WO P OE M S
My Father’s Mother drove a Cadillac, wore pantyhose, cooked a good family meal, cooked the books for the family business, polished a ring with forty diamonds, cut the power to the stove and used it to store handbags. My father’s mother accused, never forgave, was called crazy. My father’s mother told me that I held beauty like a Jesus thorn. That if I crowned a man hard enough, I’d stick, but it wouldn’t save me from anything but poor. My father’s mother once backed his father against a door and drove steak knives around his head like a halo. My father’s mother died bitter and left me her jewelry.