Camera Obscura I  {194_}
                            Bunions History
                                
Memory pastes another random cut-out:  female
an angel to me. I watch her flesh out from her sweat-
frizzed  hair to the angry bunions torturing the roots
of both big toes.  In a voice rusted from disuse, she
confessed to setting them free with pinking shears.  
Cutting easy.  Cheap perforated boats.  Blocks
for heels, like the ones on what my mother sneered
were Eleanor Roosevelt clodhops.  Memory props  
the angel's unsunned face and bent body at a board
groans beneath a basket piled high with gold-
monogrammed finger towels, tennis frocks, gowns
impossible to press.  Ruffles, ruffles, ruffles.
Basket refills like the pool of tears in an Aesop's
fable.  Filler the servant of a butterfly whose shoes
require their own closet.  Needle heels and custom-
dyed silk for evening; blinding tennis sboes; flapped
golf shoes; PTA shoes; shoes that Do Lunch;  shoes
that mince to teas and dinner after at The Club;
shoes worn once, and shoes.  Army had such, goose-
steppers wouldn't have known what hit.  Basket
ain't empty by 4:00, be the devil to pay.  Iron hisses.
Never scorches, but a burnt smell mixes with baked
rhubarb and whiffs of a man's whiskey breath.  Board
wobbles.  Child on a pallet strewn with newsprint
and crayons easy to break.  Flesh worn to a nub.  
Angel looks rained on.  Collars, pleats, sleeves, yokes,
cuffs fog her cellophane-taped specs.  Thick brown
War stockings sag and bag.  Dress not swallowed
by that apron has no shape.  Kitchen is scrubbed
raw.   Cupboard leans, and the doors want to stick.
Sink hugs a corner.  She skirted it with graying blue
checks.  Jarred soap slivers gray together, trying
to school.  Her old man unglued from that chair
by the window, slunk grinning to the front room
to make smoke rings with butts fished out of sand
and salt smoke with choice words for President
Give-Away and Winston Churchill, aka FDR
and Don't Ask.  Kitchen linoleum cracks open
as it rises and falls toward the door to a jam-packed
backporch.  Color a ragtag coat navy and wrap
the angel.  Time sees her walk wincing to a blood-
streaked dawn.  Downtown, across the bridge, half
slide down the bank.  Frozen earth finds the holes,  
then water.  Angel walks until frizz floats, then
nothing.  Old Man River, Old Man River.
Some hearsay, all fact.  Fact she never missed
a Sunday, and  was denied  "Christian burial."
Fact I cling to: in the river is a gate, led through
to warm and dry.  Anyone irons, it is for her.
Fine linen,  very best silk, cashmere subtly dyed.   
Memory turns over a sheet of newsprint,  grabs
a crayon, designs matching shoes. Fit like a dream.  

                    (c) Phyllis Jean Green
                                    for Mattie D.

                                 January 22, 2008