In Honor(em)

An excerpt

     In the kitchen,
pea-green appliances
and cornflower walls.
     Kitchen floor
     linoleum blue–
     seas to swim.
     The cupboard doors
our morning bellwether
on “bad days,”
slamming as Mom
replays hurts hurled at her,
slights,
insults,
and insinuations
in the loop of depression.
     She hated that house,
she said so,
many times,
yet, in the symptomatic
binary of the disorder,
she loved it too,
cherished memories
tiny boats on a
sea of anger and despair.
     Chasing echoes,
all of us,
each mired in our
preferendum,
or struck through with 
the sagittation 
of quotidian worry,
failing too often 
to see the flourishing
of ruderal hope–
vibrance persisting.
                                                                         Back at the table,
                                                                         nightly,
old boxes)			                                 my     father        sitting
my late father’s memory)                                 cigarette in hand struggling,
stashed away)			                                 convinced he’s  useless.
                                                                         Was he ever convinced otherwise?
                                                                         He’s in a box now, too–
the smell of cardboard decay,)                                        	  .
                                                                         bones and ash
Latin books and autographed baseballs) 	                          .
                                                                         under gray granite.