Semi-Sentimental Request Sent Over a Long Distance

—after Leon Stokesbury

Enough with postcards. Send me terrariums
filled with trinkets from your travels. Package me dirt
and weeds and press flowers if there are some.
Stream water in a vial. Learn to capture bird chirps 

and toad croaks in a tuning fork. Make dolls dressed 
in fresh laundry scraps. Steal Odysseus’s bag of wind 
then, yes, the wind. If a wasp stings you, send me the nest
so that I, too, may feel its sting when I rend 

the terrarium like an egg in a pan, releasing each scent—
O, come community park grill with damp and rusted grates;
come leaden looming threat, no, welcomed torrent
of rain; come petrichor; come all that invocates

you and whatever makes this grass grow up so green.
Ah, of course—cow shit, omnipresent yet unseen.

-

Parkinson’s

I
My grandmother, my father’s mother,
from a distance—myself in Georgia,
she in Texas. I tracked her regression
in handwritten letters on artist postcards—
paintings by Rothko, Manet, Mondrian.
I watched her cursive wither letter
by cumbrous letter, exponential decay,
until the script became my uncle’s print
with Grandma’s signature at the bottom—
a forgery of herself in shaggy dress.

II
My grandfather, my mother’s father,
much closer—myself in his living room,
he in the bedroom ringing a bell for help.
One morning he requested breakfast hash—
spam and the holy trinity—and asked
me to join. Had I known that morning
would be his last good day, I would’ve
made seconds, let breakfast bleed into lunch,
each story becoming the next until
he caught up to present, or present up to him.