Heirloom by Elisabeth Crago

Heirloom
         After Zeina Hashem Beck

I come from a line of women who leave
but don’t. My mother’s mother left her husband,
moved from Ferrara to Rome, took him
back years later, forgave his other family.
She left me the taste of tortellini in brodo,
her rose scent, a winter coat with a fur collar.
My mother left twice. First she fled Italy
for Minnesota, an easy choice she claimed.
What was there to stay for?
She was in love until he turned out to be a drinker
so she flew to Italy. 1949. Brave woman leaving
with toddler on a transatlantic prop-plane flight.
Go back to your husband, her father said, and so she
left again, ground her teeth for five more decades.
Her mother visited once, her father never, leaving
the gulf between them more and more oceanic,
though each year she’d return, a moth caught
in their flickering light. Once she brought me a tapestry
embroidered with flame she’d found in her mother’s closet.
I hung it in my living room until the memory of all
I never knew burned to ash. When my mother
told me not to visit, I left, fled to the other side
of the world where trees with names
I couldn’t pronounce canopied the house.
When she declined to visit, I dug up roses
she would have loved. Every four months I shrunk
the 10,000 miles between us until greeted as if a stranger.
After I left her ashes in the ground, I, too, left
until my children’s children cried magnetic tears,
a force foreshortening distance. I’m telling you,
the road curves away before it returns.

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Elisabeth Crago lives in Pittsburgh, PA. She holds an MFA from Carlow University and is also a graduate of the University of Michigan and Lehman College, CUNY where she received a Bachelor’s Degree in English literature and a Master’s Degree in Nursing. She has been published in Voices from the Attic, vols 21, 22 and 24, Eye to the Telescope, and Shot Glass Journal.