The Morning After
My grandmother wakes
before all of us.
She steps
into the kitchen
and stirs batter for the pancakes.
The household awakens
one by one
to realize that this is a dream.
We each follow the wooden stairs
down the cellar
to where she stored
the Aunt Jemima,
to keep it cool.
Across town,
my grandfather awakens
in a theater, where he fell asleep watching
the Feel-Good Movie of the Year.
The ushers didn’t bother to wake him,
they locked him inside.
He doesn’t understand
where his wife has gone.
In the red of morning
before the sun overcomes the mountains again
my grandmother rises
and each morning takes
a small pilgrimage
down the staircase
away from the scent of a grandmother’s house
to the smell of musk,
the smell of rot,
and in the cellar
she sits on a cold, wet log
as if she could only be lost
in a small corner of the woods.