Christmas day with my mother and grandmother + At the river

Christmas day with

my mother and grandmother

Her tenant died in the upstairs room and there were cops

outside waiting for someone to claim the body.

To get to her house, we drove the new bridge

by Fish House Road over the industrial marshes

of Northeast New Jersey.

It was cold and gray —

my grandmother was sick, so mom made soup. She packed

the car with socks and tissues and pills.

In my lola’s house, every surface is covered. The wood steps sag

from years of wear. Everything once white has yellowed.

Fifty year old carpet, appliances just as old, clothes fill

the closet, fill racks and bags, and there’s paper

in every drawer, in shoeboxes, under the bed —

Things sit stagnant for years.

We peeled her off the couch. Her body more frail than ever —

skin thin and a cough that wouldn’t quit.

I’ve never seen her so helpless. She collected her things.

A checkbook, two bundles of paper, envelopes bound together

with string.

We took her home with us.

In the car, she said that’s nice

looking into the sunset —

It was overcast — some color some gray, and there’s no way

to measure wonder.

There’s no way to hang on to things like this.

We drive by the Kearney landfill I’ve watched change over the years —

from trash to dirt to sprouts to the grassy hill it is now.

Time works a rare wonder.

I try to hold these moments.

At the river

I touch time.

I tongue time. I hold time like a lover.

Here, we grieve. Here, we sit and drink beers forever.

We watch small heaven crack

and give us sunset,

give us crickets, give us clear sky peppered with stars,

moonshining through the clouds —

We go to the levee with our tongues out, we taste the mist.

At the river

I keep time. I track each departure and arrival.

I whisper to the dead,

dance with the dead.

I’m sitting by the Mississippi, staring,

into that dark, rippling water,

and through that obsidian water,

at the bottom of the river,

everyone I love sits around a poker table, emerald

and haunted

like Van Gogh’s Night Café —

so grief is a lonely street we j-walk every day.

So I draw myself a dream —

I give birth to the dream —

so the dream becomes both a lifeline

and a stitch in my side.

The stitch opens like a bud —

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Soleil Garneau is a writer, educator & hospitality worker. She is a 2023 Miami Book Fair Emerging Writer Fellow, a Community of Writers alum, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UC Riverside. She has roots in the Mid-Atlantic, the Gulf South, and in Southern California. She is currently based in Miami, on the traditional homelands of the Tequesta peoples, and the traditional and sovereign homelands of the Seminole and Miccosukee tribes. You can find her work in The Spectacle, Salt Hill Journal, Thin Air Magazine (online) & elsewhere.