Josephine

Melanie Alberts

January 13, 2022

There was only so much I wanted to experience

through my grandmother, with her old lady smells

of ammonia, b.o., and bacon fat, her ignoble housedress

and sagging bosom, all topped off with a job as a janitress

at my once-favorite New Haven skyscraper. She survived

the scourge of her time, in my time just a history lesson

named after a country I wanted to visit until lockdown

congratulated the unreachable distances between us. 

She did teach me how to make pierogies but forgot

to mention an ingredient (friends’ faces dropped

as they ate them, those flattened pillows dolled

up in butter). She told my fortune and described

her mother’s ghost, handing to me centuries of Polish

superstition and sentimentality in an afternoon.

Through her, I saw the truth in the National Enquirer,

listened with half an ear to her rants against The Jews,

The Blacks and The Protestants and all my friends

who were not saintly offshoots of Eastern European virgins.

As a child, I wondered why dad never disclosed the date

of his parents’ marriage and his birth. Passing years soften

the past and as secrets waft through shut bedroom doors

my grandmother Josephine becomes again the “high-stepper”

she was in her youth, close-cropped curls and open smile,

flapper legs luminescent as if coated in the lilac-scented talc

she patted under her arms, on her face, across her breasts,

powder purchased in a dime store with her boyfriends’ money

jingling in a handbag, its frayed edges bursting with purest desire.

Writer and psychic artist Melanie Alberts works at the University of Texas at Austin. Her non-fiction and poetry have appeared in the Cold Moon Journal, Texas Poetry Assignment, Ransom Center Magazine, Just This, The Austin Chronicle, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and others. Follow Melanie on Instagram @clair.circles.spirit.art.