Hansel Lost
I know, Sister, you believe that we are going home.
But the sympathy you see between the pebbles and the moon
is natural, not a scheme to guide us.
This gypsy fire is our only home. We are motherless.
We are fatherless. Hunger’s downy mold has spread
through love, leaving rotted and hollowed arms to hold us.
I have heard him too. Father calling.
I have heard him spilling the letters
of your precious name on the wind.
Do not answer.
You, Sister, Killer, are the only one I trust.
We will turn over our dry bones, as expected,
instead of this miracle of gems. We will always
suspect him of having been more than weak—of
having been complicit. You would say “forget,”
you would say, “let go,” you whose innocence has survived
the sugared deceptions, the enslavement,
the mouths of the gluttonous ovens.
I would have us remember. I would have us all
wander this black forest forever, calling out the names
of our broken homes.
Remembrance of Things Neglected
I regret it now—
loaning you that copy of To the Lighthouse.
I can see its thin, feline lines reclining there
so gracefully
on your desk,
just behind the junk mail and dry pens,
and “Greetings from Missouri” paperweight.
I should have given you Proust instead—
that unsellable double volume
of Proust.
You know—the one that sat in the used book store
all through the 90s—
the one I rescued from the sidewalk bargain bin
just before the store closed, and its gentle proprietor
went off to her daughter in Colorado,
to molder away
on the high shelf of her dementia.
I’ve made it to page 121
three times now.
I mark the sublime phrases as I go,
with stars and underlines, savoring the profundity,
until I get distracted by season 17
of “Love Island.”
Oh we could have shared such rich anticipation,
and such a grand sense of failure,
as our blank minds soared over hundreds and hundreds
of unturned, yellowing pages.
I’m sorry now that we are through.
All of this time that you weren’t reading Woolf,
you could have been not reading Proust.
Christy Frushour has an MA in English from Truman State University. This is her first publication. She lives in Kirksville, Missouri with her husband and two children, and works at a greenhouse, because flowers are beautiful things.