Kristin Camitta Zimet
Nature never lies down in obedient classification; something always makes an exception, an original, life-advancing leap. So too with love: both parties cross barricades to meet. And so it is with finding faith and growing up. We discover which rules sustain, and which bar us from fullness.
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Witness
Sign this, my mother orders, pressing
her Living Will flat on the bed tray,
smoothing the creases. I start to reach,
but my chest squeezes tight.
I’m three again, creeping across
concrete in our old basement,
down where half-windows hunker
level with dirt. A light bulb swings
between the painted poles that hold
our house up. Back in the corner,
Lola bends over a narrow board.
Her forehead drips; the iron clanks;
air in my nose is rank with bleach.
Under her callused palm a sheet
steams, lapping her chest in fog.
Our family is all mixed in a heap
in front of her, in a big wicker basket.
One at a time she starts pulling us out.
Nightgowns, undershirts, ghost stains
and seams about to give: nobody
knows us like Lola, though the rule
is not to bother her with talk, not
stop her work. She won’t look up
at me, swaying on tiptoe, right next to
the board. With a hard steady swipe,
she sweeps away my mother’s cramps,
fevers and bleeds; with a soft hiss
she starches her and goes to fold her up,
top of the pile, on grandmother,
face flat as the sheet, arms angled in
across the breast, but I just close
my fist around that cloth, drag her
with my pink blanket up the stairs.
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Kristin Camitta Zimet is the author of Take in My Arms the Dark, a full-length collection of poems, and the Editor of The Sow's Ear Poetry Review. She has poems in a great many anthologies and journals including Poet Lore, Natural Bridge and Salamander. She has given poetry performances at concert halls, theaters and museums.