Beginnings
by Dave Malone
The
two grand quilting ladies
leave
their mark on the street—
one
a cigarette butt,
pink
with yesterday’s lips,
the
other a crimson handbag
catching
the light just so—
when
forty years back, she rode
the
Panama Limited to Chicago
fresh
from a divorce that never took,
her
elbows back on Ozark table
a
winter later. The smoker knows
the
story as much as her own—
her
husband a ghost running
through
flowerbeds she weeds out
at
the senior center where indoors
she
pokers with grace—far less lonely
than
any suicide king she plays.
Dave Malone’s bio: “I received my graduate degree in English
from Indiana State in 1994 and later lived in the New Albany area. I no longer
reside in Indiana, but I consider myself part Hoosier. My great (7th)
grandmother, Mary Coughman Bridgewater, was a doctor of medicine in the early
1800s and lived at the small village of Pigeon Roost with her family. Though
she lost children at the conflict there in 1812, she survived.”