Nesquehoning, Late Summer

POETRY

By Kathryn Llewellyn

We gather in Pop-pop’s kitchen, as we do every year. The uncles mix picklebacks, waiting for breakfast, and Uncle Jake asks if New York

is like Seinfeld. The cousins and I used to lie on the back lawn, pull the grass from the dirt and make wishes on planes we mistook for stars. We threw the frayed blades

of uprooted grass into the darkness, one for each detail of our someday lives: getting into and out of Penn State, working in offices. Unhappiness is the only inheritance

everyone in this lineage shares. I consider how to explain being a “businesswoman” in New York is just another last shift that pays more but never really ends. Instead I griddle up

scrapple and hash browns in Crisco—three foods I’d never admit to eating in New York. Fresh cut grass mixes with sizzling grease. I could’ve become a hairdresser, prettying up

Nesquehoning ladies for baptisms and weddings, the days we lowered them into the earth. By now I’d have popped out a few kids. For a few years, they’d love me back. I nibble

a wedge of scrapple and try scrubbing the scent of fried oil out of my skin. Scrapple is the sort of meat you can really enjoy if you don’t think too hard

about what it’s made of. Somewhere on the dirge of turnpike between here and Trenton, that last stretch of road to New York City, I stop

at Molly Pitcher Travel Plaza for scrapple-like fast-food and blunder toward whatever it was I had wished for, a little saturated, a little hungry, before the lard and canola oil go stale beneath my flesh.