Ancestral Bed
William Miller
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In the country, there were few
and no one ever slept alone. A straw
or chicken-feather mattress was for lean,
tired men home from the field,
the time between “cain’t see and cain’t see”,
for women with hands burned by lye soap,
feet blistered by bad ill-fitting shoes.
Babies were born there, too.
My grandmother come out screaming,
red-faced, eyes shut, fists balled.
She lived that way for ninety years,
survived three husbands, two kids,
the last a girl who lingered for a day.
She worked jobs that would kill
most able men, drove a tractor then a fork lift
at a coal plant that never closed.
Rosey the Riveter gone bad, she was fired
for fighting on the job, liquor on
her breath. All night on the state line
she wore a .38 on her hip while she rang
a cash register at a Jr. Food Market.
She fired that pistol three times when she
got home, to scare off thieves, ghosts,
then slammed the trailer door behind her.
The iron bed frame was all that was left
of her people, the homeplace,
the day she got married at 14 beneath
a pecan tree. No one took a picture.
She died on a mattress stained with
whiskey and cigarette burns, shaking
her fist in the smokey air, in cancer’s
worst face.
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William Miller‘s eight collection of poetry, The Crow Flew Between Us, was published by Kelsay Books in 2020. His poems have appeared in The Penn Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner and West Branch. In 2023, two of Miller’s poems were nominated for Pushcart Prizes. He lives and writes in the French Quarter of New Orleans.
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