My mother kept a saucepan with no handle and a tarnished spoon for her wax. Wax the color of pond muck more brown than yellow, but green the color of having once been organic. The pan she'd set on a low flame and when the wax had melted, she'd lift the spoon, the convex part up-facing, covered with wax, which would begin to congeal and this thin smear she'd wipe onto her upper lip, one swipe above the left side and one above the right. Then she'd light a cigarette, a filtered Raleigh purchased by the carton, the S & H Green stamps set aside for a matching platter to the table-settings for eight she'd already amassed. She'd deal us each six cards and we'd play cribbage. She would claim my missed points, didn't care that I was eight. She liked to win. Her eyes squinted when smoke flared upward. When she'd beaten me, she'd tear the hardened wax away in two swift yanks. Two curled petals, smooth on one side and hairy on the other. Two little animals.
Athena Kildegaard book of poems, Prairie Midden, is due this fall from Tinderbox Editions. Her poems have appeared recently in Prairie Schooner, december, Poetry Northwest, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She lives and teaches in western Minnesota.
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