Issue 22 - 1992

Coe Review • Issue 22
Underground in the shelter the moonlight’s waiting and you
walk across the hollow yard and through the hot sun. If you carry the
old wood chair you can stand and peer into the rusty metal pipe. You
can smell the buried life, rich with words and water and rust. You
reach into the pipe with your hand and pull out ropes of dust,
collapsed spiders and glistening white insect eggs. Those are the
words down there, you can hear them in the pipe. Stone sea sand
sister snake sun song soon. And one spider blossoms in your hand
and starts to tickle. You hold it in your hand and it scrambles around,
this thin tickling word. Sssssss. Sssssss. Some words go up and
down, other words go back and forth. The spider is a word. The surf
the sand the sea. And you push it through the pipe into grandma’s
world, where grandma waits in the dark. Spider. Spider spider.
That’s what you and grandma say together, underground where
everything is wet and thick and real. Spider. And then you hear a
round word, and under the roses you see it. It is big and fat and green.
Ur, it says. Ur. It’s wet in your hands when you lift it to the steel pipe.
Toad, it says. Toad. A big green toad, a cup of hot tea. Ur. Ur. Falling
down the long steel pipe where the other grandma waits for it.
Sometimes the grandma cries at night when you visit,
strapped in her small bed, dreaming of the hard wordless night and
all the world that is not stella. The grandma dreams with her mouth
open, her mouth black and hollow like the steel pipe, her cheeks wet
when you kiss them. Like the shelter, the grandma is filled with the
world that is not grandma. Words like crumbling concrete blocks
and broken red bricks, weeds sprouting and the unsprung sofa and
the shelter’s hard wooden lid. The grandma has an inside, too, and
you touch the tip of the grandma’s teeth, the tip of her tongue, and
the grandma says Aaaah---the everything word. Aaaah. The
moonlight burying itself tonight in the shelter, spilling down the
thick steel pipe with the swift-gliding bugs. You reach into the
grandma’s mouth looking for words there, their hard glittering
edges, like plastic toys lost in the overgrown yard. In the
underground shelter, swamps and sculpted faces, pockets of
fossilized bones and fuel, stones etched with prehistoric brains and
skulls. Aaaah, the grandma says, her hands grabbing at you. Aaaah.
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