by Virginia Chase Sutton

It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!

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It is always twilight when Gramma runs
a tepid bath for my sister and me, four inches
of amber water from the well. Through the window

she watches her luminous garden grow dim, past
the row of outhouses gone to honeysuckle, cabbage roses,
crinkly petunias, vines holding late afternoon

to the ground. In summer nightgowns, carrying
a cracked ceramic chamber-pot between us, we climb
to the one-bedroom apartment where our parents lived

their first married year. Mother drank gin and bourbon
from bottles hidden under the bed and their thick voices
vibrated down the varnished stairs, creased the crimson

rug in Gramma’s front room. When we all visit, they
do not sleep together the way they once did. I pull back
tight covers on the bed in the room beneath gabled windows,

rumpling sheets Gramma spent the morning ironing,
slide into the bed’s furrow. My sister clambers up
the four-poster where Great-grandfather Carter died,

arguing our early bedtime. I do not mind smoky light
pooling under window-shades. Across the highway
hundreds of birds line branches of an old oak, their

voices loud inside this space. My sister is asleep in the front
room. I wait for my parents’ footsteps, foggy silence.
Then a smooth scoop in my bed when my father pulls

soft blankets to his shoulders, rolls into me. Then he sleeps.
Birds settle the night. My father’s breath drones. The birds
wake early. At last, dawn, I fantasize their twittering songs.

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Virginia Chase Sutton, along with Airea Johnson, Liz Robbins, and Lauren Tivey, is the co-author of Fire Carousel, an enhanced chapbook (Main Street Rag, 2023) about varying aspects of mental illness. Poems have recently appeared in Glass: Poets Resist, Mom Egg Review, Drunk Monkeys, Stained: An Anthology, and many other publications. Nine times nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Sutton has additionally published three full-length poetry books and a chapbook. Sutton lives in Tempe, Arizona.