ROY-G-BIV wristlet.
You are corduroys in July and
a mustache smelling of chocolate.
You are Fading.
This disappearing act is over eighty years old,
stories written between layers of
paper thin, French Canadian skin wrapped loosely ‘round knuckles,
crack crickity crack
bones like easels in art class folding, unfolding.
You used to drown kittens when the barn cats littered
their young in bins of hay,
used to paint boats on harbors and
fighter planes dropping nepalm sunsets on Vietnam,
used to read poetry.
Grampa,
I lie to you
daily—
at coffee-time, two o’clock,
you don’t notice the
Chinese ladders of rainbow, like vines climbing from wrist
to elbow,
to shoulder,
to chest,
to heart.
You’d reach for the shrub cutters and
that would be that.
So for now,
I’ll keep lying and you
will keep dying but at least
I won’t be the one to blame.
-J.Morrill
