10-13-2025
Dana Malone & Lauren Suzanne (co-written)
GHOST HOUR, A MONTH AFTER MY MOTHER'S DEATH
Almost everything can be
forgiven at least
that's what I hoped for.
And shatter-proof
glass from all the things
that could harm me.
Almost everything rests
on her grave
or the touch of my hand
on her shoulder.
What I did not know
would be the last.
Or her palm between
my shoulder blades
all those childhood nights
I did not think
I could dream
that something besides monsters
would be almost everything.
THREE SUMMERS BEFORE IT HAPPENED
In the backyard of our little house on Harrison street, a tire swing sits next to a frayed oak, under which the patch of dirt reminds the ground that before the children’s feet there was grass.
The yard is not large, laced around with a metal gate and adorned with a vegetable garden, storage shed, and back porch with four blurry glass chairs, a table, and a grill for steaks and corn on the cob on summer nights when lightning bugs and children roamed where they pleased.
Days like this when porch steps felt like promises and cicadas conducted a symphony. Spoonfuls of peanut butter and cold sprays of sunscreen protected us from the outside world. My sister digs a burrow to China behind the maple tree and I perform operas for our cats near the lettuce heads.
These moments pass as naturally as a season as the whole world kept moving and we stay safe. Here, in the summer on the lawn near the house on the street that your memories cannot allow to deteriorate. Just like mom’s red hair and dad’s French vanilla coffee creamer, the concrete is always the same: smooth, un-cracked, and warm to the touch.
Maybe a decade later, there sits a bucket under the water drain filled with algaed water and a vagabond snail or two. Maybe that’s after the cancer treatment doesn’t work, after the hope for remission has fallen away, after the funeral and after the downcast looks when time moves in the way adults said it always would. Maybe the grass has overgrown the dirt patch, the children have stopped singing to vegetables, the cicadas leave the sky to nest underneath the mournful soil. But that image holds no strength here.
The rain cannot touch us here. It cannot hold its weight to the honeysuckle shelter of a child’s dream.
YOUR CHILDHOOD HOME GROWS HEAVIER WITH EACH NEW DUSTING OF THE EARTH
Layers of scrap metal form the bars that trace the backyard. Birds nestle in trees. Dogs bark absentmindedly, drifting to sleep in the warmth. If you jump the fence they’ll take you to Azkaban, Sean said.
Our older brother, maker of myths, conjurer of baseball cards, connoisseur of donkey kong and super smash bros. Jenni, the youngest, waves of unkempt hair trailing behind her. She was so unruly the rest of her couldn’t keep up. There was too much world to see. Lauren, middle child, the gate keeper of silence and sarcasm. She brushed her hair one hundred times each night because nana said that makes it shiny.
There is so much more we could have said but the time spent in the sun, yelling at each other should and must be enough.
Now the gap in space where you should be is its own presence.
-from Mother. Grave. Ghost (a co-written chapbook) celebrated with the author's permission and selected by PoemoftheWeek.com Founder and Editor, Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum
Based in Nashville, Tenn., Dana Malone is the recipient of the 2020 poetry prize from Waxing & Waning/Tempest Edition. Her work was accepted for the 2021-2022 Women Speak of Women of Appalachia Project™, and she recently completed a residency for Art Wire, a collaboration of the Porch Writers Collective and OZ Arts Nashville. Her work has appeared on the podcast, Versify; in Number One, Wordpeace, and Native; on the stages of Tennessee Women’s Theater Project; and through #MusicCitySingsAt6.
Lauren Suzanne is a writer and poet from Nashville, Tennessee, an alumna of Belmont University, and a graduate of the MAPH program in Art History at the University of Chicago. Her work has appeared in The Maine Review, The Crambo, and the 601. She won first place in the 2018 Sandra Hutchins Creative Writing Award in Creative Nonfiction at Belmont University. She currently lives in Chicago, Illinois.
