Summer 2014: Poetry
Under the Tongue
by Cindy Stewart-Rinier
On one side of the yellow duplex, Billy Graham’s sermons ascended from Grandma’s plastic bedstead radio, filling her apartment like threatening cumulonimbi while I, nearly four, sat at the edge of her kitchen table under those clouds, drawing the five letters of my name – and my own conclusions – each writing lesson always ending in her frustration with my contrary y’s. And on the other side, my mother required perfect usage the way other mothers insisted on overcoats and galoshes, her desire to shield us in grammatically correct language, the kind that might have helped her own mother pass and deflect the rap of the reservation nun’s ruler, even if it couldn’t stop Grandma’s muttered Heathens. But on weekends, Dad blared Lady Day's double negatives so loud over the hi-fi it blew There ain't nothing I can do right through the walls, a downpour that drenched my grandmother’s white doilies and angel food cakes, lampshades and carpets, the broad leaves, the burgundy flowers of her heavy draperies, her very beliefs – all soaked in blues that dripped down to the cellar, the way rain finds its way to roots.
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