CORIUM, 1973

The soft crinkles in my grandmother’s skin are a memory I place on the edge of where
everything begins. The train cars chugged slowly that Saturday across the tracks and I
was so unsentimental about everything.  Time was a band I could stretch into infinity. It  
felt meaningless.   In the car, with my mother gripping the steering wheel on a day that
felt like it might never end, my grandmother kept her large pocketbook on her lap, with
one arm stretched across the back of the old Chevrolet.  Her skin looked papery, and I
brushed the tips of my fingers across the tips of hers.  She never looked back at me,
sweating in the back seat thirsty beyond anything I’d ever felt. Back at our house she
needed to be persuaded to play hymns on my tabletop organ that wheezed and hummed.
She played Rock of Ages over and over again with her eyes closed, and then just one Ave
Maria.  Early the next day, she put the coffee pot on the stove, placed her false teeth in
her mouth, and sat in the chair by the front window to say her rosary.  When she was
buried three days later, I thought of what would become of her soft, powdery, and papery
skin.  My grandfather told us she said goodbye to him before she left, a detail that set our
teeth on edge not because it couldn’t be true, but because it probably was.  He said he
held her hand, but for the first time ever, it was rough. The scent of the funeral flowers
made me nauseous with grief. The priest spoke so slowly as soft petals fell to the floor
and that we walked over without thinking. The forced silence of the grieving was a time
bomb ticking in my growing brain.  I pulled at the skin of my fingers while time stood
still with a stubbornness I wanted to bang my head against. I sucked my bloody fingers, a
prisoner in a shell of my own skin and not a single person who loved me to pull me out of
hiding.

Michelle Reale is the author of several poetry and flash collections, including Season of Subtraction (Bordighera Press, 2019), Blood Memory (Idea Press), and In the Year of Hurricane Agnes (Alien Buddha Press).  She is the Founding and Managing Editor for both OVUNQUE SIAMO: New Italian-American Writing and The Red Fern Review. She teaches poetry in the MFA program at Arcadia University.