BREAKFAST WITH GRANDMA

BREAKFASTS WITH GRANDMA

POETRY Zebulon Huset

Sitting by the frosted window like a sentinel guarding her outpost from wintering cardinals, my grandma held her triangular spoon like a detached bayonet and stabbed her halved-grapefruit. She wasn’t watching us kids, or the birds, her attention somewhere off in the mist of the past as she, again, takes a sour first bite sloppy against her dentures and thin lips, tongue curling against the citric acid, she reaches for the old frosting container where we kept sugar for our generic baggies of Rice Krispities or Corn Flecks. Every morning, the same sour-faced bite, the same triangle spoon with little teeth to dig into the split fruit’s acute, segmented flesh. The same distant look occupying her eyes glazed over with the ice of almost a century’s worth of winters, most with far less insulation or electricity. No matter what we said it was as if we were cardinals in a skeletal tree, or shoveled snow lining the driveway or shell-shocked ghosts she couldn’t recall the names of, even if she tried.