the new home of @bookmark_terry
When my grandmother was dying in her soft bed in the corner of my aunt’s farmhouse kitchen, we all sat with her, even the children staring at the white, shut face, masked in a rapture of its own while all the noisy racket of death filled the air, lungs letting go, blood about to rise in a purple wash, the pot of bones…
In the cramped living room of my childhood between sagging rough-skinned sofa that made me itch and swaybacked chair surrounded by ashtrays where my father read every word of the paper shrouded in blue smoke, coughed rusty phlegm and muttering doom, the rug was a factory oriental and the pattern called tree of life. My mother explained as we plucked a chicken tree of…