My grandmother couldn’t cook, so
We wrote her out of the stories
Every holiday, every birthday
Every day she spent preparing
We forget her name,
When we could remember it, it rolled, foreign
On our tongues, and lips
Like boats too small for choppy swells.
The family rings around the table, chair legs grinding
On linoleum, photo albums open
Blooming like the flowers in her garden that we never
notice, they spring up every year, untended
Struggling through the weeds
we recognize our smiles
Our noses, the shape of our eyes
We flip through photos, but no
One sees the person behind the camera
No one mentions her nose, the shape of her eyes
The one who organized
And labeled the albums, script as tight and drawn
As a mouth in concentration
as you stir a quickly burning sauce
Her death is the equator, an invisible line
Declaring the loosely navigational space
Where the family stores our myths, the stars that predict who
We are, we use trinkets of navigation
Books of genealogy, stories of war generals
Sailing, settlement, we shout over her voice
She fades into the couch cover, a transparent
Plastic thing protecting the fabric underneath
We never forgive her for dying
We never forgive her for not being able to
Make a meatloaf
Or a pie
Or a casserole
Lauren Parker is a writer based in Oakland. She’s a graduate of Hiram College’s Creative Writing program and has written for the Toast, the Tusk, Ravishly, The Bold Italic, Daily Xtra, Pulp Magazine, and Autostraddle. She’s the winner of the Summer of Love essay contest in the Daily Californian, the Vachel Lindsay poetry prize, and the author of the zine My Side of Our Story. She produces a monthly reading series in the Bay Area called Cliterary Salon, and embarrasses her family on Twitter @laurenink.