Fretwork

By the time Mother took me to her birthplace—Bequia—
I was a fifth-grade wordsmith in a first-grader’s body.
H-o-m-e—too easy—was off my spelling list although

I didn’t know what home meant. I did not recognize my
Mother’s mother: she was the color of pitch and whether
she was pleased to see her daughter and me, she kept it to

herself, a mystery. “Tonight”, Mother said, “we’ll sleep
under cotton netting to keep the mosquitoes from eating
us up” and like the man who delivered his catch from

early sea light, her voice echoed. Later, as grannie’s house
went dark, a bauble of moon glistening off the fretwork,
Mother found me atop a chest of drawers—(I had known

how to save myself, opened each drawer, more, then more,
scaled every one stuffed with the scent of lies and Hazell
history)—shivering in the nocturnal damp. When she asked,

I said I was hiding from the mosquitoes. Then I saw my first
on a screen. “How do they `eat you up’”? I probed. Nothing’s
as you imagine it, Mother said, and she wasn’t speaking to me.

Lynne Thompson is the author of Start With A Small Guitar and Beg No Pardon. A 2016 City of Los Angeles Fellow, Thompson’s work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Wide Awake and Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond. Thompson is reviews & essays editor of Spillway.
*Photo courtesy Veronica Olivotto.
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