By LAKE ANGELA
Akron, Ohio and Opelika, Alabama
Grace: Sunday Services
As a girl in curls and white patent flats, I could criss-
cross worlds—Sicily and Ohio, steaming kitchen
and chilly study. I slipped through serving aperitifs and caffé
corretto, understood Sicilian but wasn’t meant to speak
the language of deeply cadenced voices that rose
above trim beards and fell below stiff hat brims. Cheating,
I caught through the crunch of biscotti. —His severed body part
limp on her doorstep now spilled onto Mama’s polished floor.
The words formed a puzzle, a game for grown children
with serious faces and serious Colts, Sundays after Church.
Around the olive table misplaced in Akron they exchanged services
as I’d slink through clouds of gray blue smoke and try to linger.
Just before Nanna tugged me out the door—This meeting
is for the men—deep voices rasped, We heard she went
to the authorities…can’t abide collaborating. My grandfather’s
voice came down like a gavel, Well, take care of her, then—
I still felt safe.
Grace: My First Child in Cinnabar
They wouldn’t let me hold my boy. He was supposed to be
born in May, but he came two months early to the Alabama
backwoods. My husband’s hometown had scant electric, little
heat. That’s why Hurland had enlisted in the first place—to learn
to be an electrician, get enough to eat. I made myself a nest
from a rough army blanket and my lace and velvet dresses—
no need for rhinestone-studded style now, soft violet and maroon—
like some kind of bird, I tried to keep in the heat, breathe red
into his cheeks. But two days later my baby died.
They drove me to the hospital in town when I climbed out
of my mind, I was so mad at God and the whole world for killing
my child. The doctors kept me locked up for ten days. They
wouldn’t let me hold my boy. Like those at home, the staff
in white coats kept me inside, no matter how I banged against
the glass doors or made noise. I was not allowed to attend
the funeral. I never held my boy. Stared out at the tobacco
leaves, the sunbaked fields. Started lighting up my weeds again
to keep some friendly smoke rings around me.
Every time I turned around after that, I was pregnant again,
but it wasn’t the same. When I started bleeding real bad, I wanted
to take a walk outside, leave a trail of blood for the pigeons to find
me. My mother-in-law babysat me because my husband didn’t
trust me. Let me stay at home, Hurland, I said. No, I can’t leave you
alone; you’ll be climbing the walls and doing whatever else
pleases you. Every time I got up to use the powder room,
my mother-in-law dropped her knitting needles in her lap,
asked, Where you going, Sugar? I sat down to watch
the puce carpet again: Nowhere.
Lake Angela is a poet, translator, and choreographer from Lake Erie. Her most recent book, Scivias Choreomaniae (Spuyten Duyvil), advocates for schizophrenia-spectrum creativity based on her work as a Mad dance therapist at a state psychiatric institution. Lake holds a PhD in intersemiotic translation and is a medieval mystic. Her work can be read in Seneca Review, Passages North, Portland Review, and ANMLY, among others. The poems in Grace’s voice belong to her collection Autobiography of My Grandmothers.
