We dress up to lay our dead down—so ceremonial, even though there’s no such thing as buried. Disassembled, sure—my mother a heap of shards by now, twenty years on— but hardly underground. Mainly she’s here, a ramshackle ghost in need of repair. She haunts the hardware store where my husband sifts through bolts and rings for customers intent on resurrecting broken things. Everything fails with time but lingers, waits to reassemble. Let me tell you what I’m trying to do, customers say. Let me tell you what I need. And he finds the very thing that works. The coffee grinder grinds again, the plate’s undropped—mending being a kind of memory (like words) a bringing back. Though when I think of all my mother wanted still to do—how not quite ready she was to die and how alone (the rest of us a thousand miles away and not a clue)—I wonder where the bolt for that is, the hinge, the metal plate to cover up the hole; the screw.
Ruth Hoberman is a writer living in Newtonville, Massachusetts. Since her 2015 retirement from Eastern Illinois University, she has published poems and essays in such journals as Smartish Pace, RHINO, West Trestle Review, Ibbetson Street, and Ploughshares.
11/8 / Meet the Artist with visiting poet-in-residence Ruby Hansen Murray / 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
11/8 / Poetry Reading with visiting poet-in-residence Ruby Hansen Murray and local poet Judy Ireland / 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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