Wrapped
Cammy Thomas When we pack your kitchen just before you two move to LA, I double-wrap everything: a layer of foam, and then newsprint. I do not want breakage on my conscience. A mother does not want to break anything. We fill boxes with cake slicers, nesting bowls, your Vera Wang dishes still in their cardboard cases, and I realize your kitchen is fancier than mine. Those dishes: white with subtle gold rims, a pattern your great grandmother would have loved. All your dreams in them, simple elegance, a calm home, something to give to your children, should they appear. Gold and white, good fortune and purity, and death too. I wish for you the permanence you have campaigned for. Wrap the glass vases, so breakable. Wrap the commemorative mugs: your college, Christmas, the hearts and arrows of your high school love now grown into something tough and fragile. He's not here today, out saying goodbye to his oldest friend, leaving you with me, wrapping things up in this rented kitchen. |
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About the Author: Cammy Thomas has published two collections of poems with Four Way Books: Inscriptions (2014), and Cathedral of Wish, which received the 2006 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her poems are forthcoming or have recently appeared in Tampa Review, Ocean State Review, Compose, WomenArts Quarterly, and The Missouri Review. A fellowship from the Ragdale Foundation helped her complete Inscriptions. Cammy lives in Lexington, Massachusetts.