Burning Ground
By Katy E. Ellis
We couldn’t see blood hemorrhaging across the grasslands of our father’s right brain hemisphere like a fiery saw blade on the horizon, separating land/smoke father we know/don’t know. No time for us to dig a moat around the family history built on a one-way train ticket from Duluth to Seattle and the oldest Luedtke girl cashiering at Schrader Drugs. No choice what’s saved/what’s lost of his memory store. He recalled a love of cold milk but couldn’t name the thing that tells time that you wear on your wrist. Lost the steps for tying shoes, yet in capital letters he wrote and correctly spelled the name of each grandchild. To fend off the scorch of his forgetting, we had to trust the small fires we lit when our father knew us as his children. Pray our flames burned ground enough to keep the father who remains/ the father we mourn.
Katy E. Ellis is the author of the novel-length prose poem, Home Water, Home Land (Tolsun Books) and three chapbooks: Night Watch, winner of the Floating Bridge chapbook competition; Urban Animal Expeditions; and Gravity, a single poem also nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared in Mom Egg Review, Pithead Chapel, Rise Up, American Journal of Poetry, Literary Mama, MAYDAY Magazine, Burnside Review, and in the Canadian journals PRISM International, Grain, and Fiddlehead.
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Beautiful, touching, utterly heartbreaking words. Every family makes moments. Of all of this may be the harshest because we live on the recognition of each other in our roles in life. Your words reach out for a hug.