“Blue Prints” by Rose McLarney (poetry ’10)

Blue Prints

I saw the blueprint
of your apartment.
Edna always
shows me the letters,
Mama also.
Seems we should be
talking color schemes,
picking cotton,
and hunting apples
in the leaves. (Ha)
They are all gone
now you know.

Reading the lines tailored to a slender slip of paper, I read into the breaks. I read them as baring the bleakness held in the parentheses, giving the ha, like a dejected speaker’s lip, a twist. As pausing after They are all gone so the reader can think back to the loves named that would go too. And as making a heavy declaration of now you know by standing it alone.

This is the first among the letters to my grandmother, Elizabeth (as I must get used to her being addressed). Elizabeth, age seventeen, had just married and moved from the family farm in North Carolina to where her husband would work in Washington, DC. The writer is an aunt I never met. At the time, she is near Elizabeth’s age, also recently married.

In North Carolina, the unmarried women of a household had all slept in a single bed. In DC, the bed is only something the family can inquire about as a movable object, wondering how, among other furniture, it has been positioned.

[…continue reading “Blue Prints” at Blackbird.]