by Krista Jane Luttrell

Nanny’s knitting,
I’m remembering.
I’m remembering she’s knitting
leftover balls of yarn,
in a kaleidoscope of hues
and blends
in her well-worn leather-faux,
reclining chair,
reclining.
I’m watching her,
watching the magic
her dainty hands perform
from the cloth-scraps braided
for a rug, hand-made,
lying ‘round
the dining room floor
in that old house
on Back Cove.
Her hands make
pastel metal sticks dance,
in a lightly rhythmic dance:
clickity-clack,
clickity-clack,
clickity-clack,
clack, clack, clack.
A zig-zag-pattern emerged,
its grown long,

and longer still,
until it falls,
falling,
it fell
into a pool of color
on the dull floor beside her.
I’m watching her
fill the soft little loops
with strength of hearty hope
of making another,
and another,
those twisted fiber threads
bound together
in the warmth of red.
blue’s cool, and
green’s divine serenity.
Nanny’s knitting,
Nanny’s knitting.
Today I’m feeling so joyful
in remembering
Nanny knitting.

(in memory of my grandmother, Helen)

by R.H. DeVault

Hands clapping over our heads
feet sliding in socks over dimpled
linoleum, cream and gold.

Blue Listerine-colored numbers
glowing through the face
of a clock radio mounted under

the cabinet beneath the drinking
glasses. Sitting on the ninety
degree angle where counters

meet, hearing Jim Croce’s
Pennsylvania folk revival
tones slap the walls of the

kitchen. Singing about
the Southside of Chicago
like it was just outside

our Middle Tennessee farmhouse.
Heels tapping the cabinets
mimic the strike of pool

cues, and bad, bad Leroy Brown
was just about to walk in.
Milk, not beer. Suckers, not cigarettes.

But every tune we howled
Dixie Dawn, carwash blues,
roller derby queen

until we were breathless
from swinging and dancing,
our broom the microphone.

by R.H. DeVault

Helen washes her hair
with rain water.
A brunette cascade
throws diamonds through
the air.

Her startling doe eyes
sparkle copper
She is ten if she is a day
but a very old ten.

Her mother saves loose
string, crooked
Bobby pins, wooden spools
Helen adopts this.

Even at eighty-five
she is ten.
She will keep the stockings
with the run

In the right calf and mark
them “wear with slacks”
She will collect 100 bread
ties, but only

Until she finds more.
Every can,
every bottle gets returned
for a dime.

Ten cents is $1.85 in 1929.

by Molly Smith

Where are we supposed to feel invisible shifts?
I still go to work; I still buy the same kind of milk.
My fingers feel the same, my toes, my gut.
When the world has capsized while looking right side up,
how do we measure the difference?
Like a bird’s relationship with a glass wall, I find
myself in lots and lots of types of days
but they’re different from before, melted and
sticky like sugar in the grooves of a fingerprint.
I think we feel different kinds of grief in similar
places: salt and pepper shakers, split ends, the pages of a book.
I’d like to cut the word goodbye from the dictionary
with a pair of dull scissors so it understands its dull pain.
Maybe I do feel these shifts in my fingers
in fingernail marks on my palm and
cold metal surrounding my thumb.
I hope goodbye is supposed to taste metallic.