O N T H E F E A ST O F ST. JO SE PH CJ Giroux The skin of her sleeping grandfather looks like paper dampened, smoothed, dried. He remains tethered by tubing: yellow fluid draining from his side, the slow drip of saline. She watches behind glass. No aides come in this twilight time, no sounds of nursing life, but somewhere, elsewhere, gurneys rattle on bleached tiles; she recalls two-car trains on the crumbling bridge spanning the narrows of her youth. In the parking lot, the engine rattles, the heater struggles against the evening’s low, windchill. Under the yellow tint of the worm moon trembling, haloed, she reads a former colleague’s Facebook lines about lake life in the little finger— ice cracking, groaning, and then heaving words, water, wind through circles of open water; She thinks of these dark pools as wounds, hears them speak and then silence: moments of consciousness gained, gone, frozen. She breathes in, holds, exhales, remembers other night skies and more: her grandfather’s graveled instructions— cut bait on the diagonal, feel for the tug— escaping from his tobacco-stained beard. Shadows were a dark blue and the cold perfumed with cherry tobacco. His ice-fishing buddies, dressed in layers of camouflage, drilled with precision. They prayed for perch, walleye; the fish, they laughed, were like women: caught, released, good for a meal, ones that got away.
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