which means most of the time no one knows how much Marie is with me, inside my right leg in particular, behind the knee. After a while of standing, it throbs and I have to shift my weight and it is difficult for me to listen to what someone wants from me because I am in standing in my garden in Brooklyn with a pair of scissors to trim the white rosebush my apron splattered with sauce. I called her Nanny, but her name was Marie. I can’t say I don’t mind having her blood running through her varicose veins but if someone has to, I’m glad it is me. I don’t garden, but I do make her sauce and yesterday I accidentally bought four boxes of lemon cake mix at Trader Joe’s because I like to serve it in the summers with berries but then I remembered there was only me and my husband to serve it to now that the kids are gone, and that’s a lot of cake. I thought of Marie’s roses blooming for no one and her sauce uselessly simmering. Marie came to this country on a ship called the Giuseppe Verdi on December 17, 1920. She was nine. I don’t know about you, but I like knowing this. It adds a certain glamour to me sitting here in these thigh-high compression hose that I have to wear for three days after my first round of sclerotherapy like a cast, the doctor said, so on the third day I stink like Sylvia’s Esther who wore her green dirndl skirt and white blouse that she borrowed from Betsy for three weeks straight. The hose has grown a little damp, and my legs are now things I lug around, lifting them in and out of bed, you know like all of history, like my poor Nanny who lived before sclerotherapy, with her husband Frank who was what they call no good, drinking in the garage, throwing plates, ripping the phone from the wall. Google says sclerotherapy is a relatively painless procedure for most people, and I’d like to meet these most people because I had to bite my knuckle each of the twenty times the doctor shot the medicine into my veins, which burns as it travels, and still I cried out, which then I had to apologize for, and the doctor, whose name is Megan, offering me a side of therapy, said, It’s okay to cry out when I’m hurting you, and I said, thank you, and she said, It’s so cool, watching the medicine move through the vein.
Laura Read is the author of But She Is Also Jane, Dresses from the Old Country, Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral, and The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You. She teaches at Spokane Falls Community College and in the MFA program at Eastern Washington University.
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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