It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
It is always twilight when Gramma runs a tepid bath for my sister and me, four inches of amber water from the well. Through the window she watches her luminous garden grow dim, past the row of outhouses gone to honeysuckle, cabbage roses, crinkly petunias, vines holding late afternoon to the ground. In summer nightgowns, carrying a cracked ceramic chamber-pot between us, we climb to the one-bedroom apartment where our parents lived their first married year. Mother drank gin and bourbon from bottles hidden under the bed and their thick voices vibrated down the varnished stairs, creased the crimson rug in Gramma’s front room. When we all visit, they do not sleep together the way they once did. I pull back tight covers on the bed in the room beneath gabled windows, rumpling sheets Gramma spent the morning ironing, slide into the bed’s furrow. My sister clambers up the four-poster where Great-grandfather Carter died, arguing our early bedtime. I do not mind smoky light pooling under window-shades. Across the highway hundreds of birds line branches of an old oak, their voices loud inside this space. My sister is asleep in the front room. I wait for my parents’ footsteps, foggy silence. Then a smooth scoop in my bed when my father pulls soft blankets to his shoulders, rolls into me. Then he sleeps. Birds settle the night. My father’s breath drones. The birds wake early. At last, dawn, I fantasize their twittering songs.
Virginia Chase Sutton, along with Airea Johnson, Liz Robbins, and Lauren Tivey, is the co-author of Fire Carousel, an enhanced chapbook (Main Street Rag, 2023) about varying aspects of mental illness. Poems have recently appeared in Glass: Poets Resist, Mom Egg Review, Drunk Monkeys, Stained: An Anthology, and many other publications. Nine times nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Sutton has additionally published three full-length poetry books and a chapbook. Sutton lives in Tempe, Arizona.
See you at AWP!
2/7 / Meet the Artist with visiting poet-in-residence Farnaz Fatemi / The Library at The Betsy-South Beach, Miami Beach, FL / Live and Live-Streamed on Instagram Live/Facebook Live at @swwimmiami / 6:00 pm EST / Free
2/7 / Poetry Reading with visiting poet-in-residence Farnaz Fatemi + local writer Fabienne Josaphat / The Library at The Betsy-South Beach, Miami Beach, FL / Live and Live-Streamed on Instagram Live/Facebook Live at @swwimmiami / 7:30 pm EST / Free
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