Tag: Cathryn Shea

Anniversary Memento by Cathryn Shea

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Anniversary Memento

I throw on my housecoat
so before breaking the fast
I can fetch the morning paper,
that archaic medium for news.
Then time to remove accumulations
of body and soul. I mean bathe.
The long détente of parenting
and employment years behind us.
It’s our anniversary.
Instead of a bejeweled gift
I will settle for a carafe
or crockpot. An inverse memento mori,
interlocking cells of marriage spilling.
I know my husband in our housewares.
Having brushed him with my tongue
many years during our misdemeanor
home life, era more like error,
with its dabbling in booze and drugs,
and slamming of doors.
There was a brief Paradiso Terrestre,
fleeting cataracts of Edens.
Now our routine is forgiving,
my conscience feels swaddled.
I resist anxiety. Never mind remorse
that we didn’t behave better
in this earthly life, as I dream we did
in a nocturnal shadow life.
I cede to acceptance, this bundle of years.
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Cathryn Shea’s second full-length poetry collection, “Ghost Matinee,” will be published in 2025. Her first is “Genealogy Lesson for the Laity” (both with Unsolicited Press). A Best of the Net nominee, Cathryn’s poetry has been in several anthologies and appears in Rust + Moth, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Gargoyle, and widely elsewhere. Cathryn served as editor for Marin Poetry Center Anthology, and she’s a fourth-generation northern Californian living with her family in Fairfax, CA. See cathrynshea.com

Missive to Nancy by Cathryn Shea

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Missive to Nancy 

Dear sister, you would be astonished to know
that I now occupy a house (with only my husband
and cat since the kids have left) which is the same
architecture and plan, built the same year
as that place on Santa Maria Avenue.
It’s a pattern house, a kit. A step up maybe
from ticky tacky, a little box nevertheless.
When I sit in my living room now,

I imagine you shaking your crib into the hallway
from our parents’ bedroom where you were supposed to be
sound asleep for the night per our mother’s anxious prayer:
God Almighty, make baby sleep. Amen.
But, no, you would appear in the hallway at the helm
of your slatted conveyance. Shaking, banging, rattling forward.
Pointing to mother on the couch in front of the TV.

So now I sit here and recall you in your Annie Oakley getup
with six-shooter and holster. Or I see you in your highchair,
bowl of cereal spilled over your head,
milk dripping everywhere, our mother wiping up the mess,
cussing then apologizing for words
that had no meaning to her little girls
who didn’t have a vocabulary for what would be
the design of their lives in this world.

 

 

Cathryn Shea is the author of the full-length poetry collection “Genealogy Lesson for the Laity” (Unsolicited Press, September 2020) and the chapbooks “Backpack Full of Leaves” (Cyberwit, 2019), “Secrets Hidden in a Pear Tree” (dancing girl press, 2019), and “It’s Raining Lullabies” (dancing girl press, 2017). Cathryn’s poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net and appears in New Orleans Review, Typehouse, Tar River Poetry, Rust + Moth, Tinderbox, and elsewhere. Cathryn served as editor for the annual Marin Poetry Center Anthology. See https://www.cathrynshea.com/ and @cathy_shea on Twitter.