I.

I won’t go up to the casket like a crystal ball. 

II.

Granny said the first thing that she heard when I was born were the people around her saying that I took after her. It is so—I have her dark eyes; I need her thick glasses. I am discovering every day as my mind stalls longer and longer, new ways in which I take after her. 

III. 

I think they’ll have to bathe me five times a week when I’m older, not three like they do my grandmother. I get the nervous sweats, and I don’t want to smell like all of the other old women—like shea butter lotion and pity.

4.

I awoke from a short nap, went to the toilet, washed my hands, slept,

 and dreamt of a day that repeated, second by second exactly the same, 

until, awake again, I asked my roommate if I’d ever moved. 

She said only just now.

- nap on January 9

I.

Old faces stretch miles wide in the reflection off of the brass casket bars, making strangers.

II.

On hot summer days, after my grandfather and I toted the scraps to the chickens, I would settle on the carpeted floor of my grandmother’s trailer to listen to the eleven-o’clock news on the radio. I would watch my grandmother tilt her head as the man’s voice droned on the radio. To me, who was young and foolish, every day the speaker said the same thing; but to my grandmother, there was the wonder of a wiser soul taking in the changing world.

III.

There’s always a new drawled forgetting by my grandmother’s bedside.

4.

I can see nothing but it for minutes.

And then I turn my head and I physically wake up with the same motion.

I feel so heavy. 

I thought that I had woken up between dreams, 

but I realized, upon waking, 

that I felt heavier than I had every time I had woken—

not more conscious, but heavier, and my weight felt balanced in me. 

So now, I don’t think that I had even woken up.

Not a good feeling

- night of February 10

I.

By her bedside, while she called out to shadows and named them familiar names and misremembered my own, I think I saw the ending—hers and my own.

II.

Even though she warned me that I could lose a finger, I held back the seat cushion and tangled my digits in the wooden mechanisms at the bottom of Granny’s rocking chair, because I could handle myself.

III.

My grandmother’s sister started one day to say that someone done stole her house, and after that was engulfed in mirage. Her daughters look just like my dad—wide blue eyes and cutting expressions; but they say more of what they know, and what they think they know. I meet their wet eyes today, and I learn that it’s worse when they’re silent.

4.

I woke up kind of ill-feeling and defeated, 

because it was just a lot of sleeping 

and the same thing happening again and again 

and it felt almost hopeless 

that the dreams would ever be anything but that. 

- night of March 11