Tag: Jeff McRae

Evening News by Jeff McRae

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 2 Comments

Evening News

Mother spent the last years throwing
out family objects. You’ll have less to
suffer over when the time for suffering
comes, she says like she’s describing
the good sense of cleaning your pots
and pans while cooking. When I visit
we wash and dry the dishes after dinner
then drink tea on the couch, feet sharing
the tiny table her father made she found
when they emptied out her childhood
home in 1977. Her parents were dead
before she turned thirty. You never get
to know them as adults, she says and still
calls them Mumma and Daddy. Now
she says things like, Area rugs are the
bane of the elderly. She says, I love you,
to her old friend when she calls to say
her husband has decided to drink
the juice the doctor gave that will put
him to sleep for good. I am a stranger
to her life of friends falling in the living
room, fracturing femurs; friends who
can’t remember their meds or take a
deep breath; friends calling it quits,
who can’t do it even one more day.

*

Jeff McRae lives in Vermont and is a general news reporter for Vermont News and Media. His collection, The Kingdom Where No One Dies, published by Pulley Press, is a finalist for the Vermont Book Award for poetry.

Span by Jeff McRae

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ Leave a comment

Span

She was there, silent as a rag doll.
I unpinned her calendar from the wall.
A busy year until early May—
a hair appointment the very day
someone took her out in a bag.
Years were crumbs, absence sound.
She didn’t say a word. I heard her
everywhere. You watched
from the window but she
didn’t appear. When we arrived
and opened the door
for a second I believed
she’d just run to the store.
She wasn’t coming back.
Or hadn’t completely gone,
I couldn’t tell. With my finger
I upset the little bells on the porch,
expecting to hear her call my name.
Instead, the kids wanted to know—
Dad, can we watch a show?
and scattered to the blue corners
of her couch. I occupied
an empty chair, surveyed the room:
wool blankets she threw
over the bannister, the quiet
Baldwin upright in the corner.
Her collection of keys
in a basket on the piano bench.
She never told me what they meant.

*

Jeff McRae’s poems have appeared in The Maynard, Massachusetts Review, Antioch Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Salamander, The Briar Cliff Review, Mudfish, Rattle, and elsewhere. He lives in Vermont.