You had sat at our tables for decades,
until one day, in the midst of a story told many times,
you carried a flickering question
through the crumpling hallways of yourself,
and you answered, enough. And as we continued
to pass the plates and tell the stories,
you listened to your growing silence, then dropping everything
as if to say, you’re not listening, your stillness at first unheard
among the clacking Fiestaware collected through three generations,
each embossing thinner than the grandmother before.
How do we decide to turn our heads to the wall? I can still taste
the lemon icebox pie at that Memphis restaurant by the railroad track,
the chefs and servers holding hands in a circle and praying,
see our first-born daughter lifted shivering and bloody
into the light, feel the tang of a tongue’s tip caress my own
as she and I swayed in her kitchen, that swallowtail the size of a bird
tasting blooms on my grandfather’s casket while the minister spoke,
the silent weeping of my daddy, its great black and yellow wings
opening, closing when our eyes widened briefly
in clumsy astonishment, then resuming the meals and the days,
hours opening, closing like wings slowly drying, waiting for us
to put down the bright bowls, to have had enough.

(First published in Delta Poetry Review 6:18, October 2024. Thanks to the editors.)