My
Sister’s Clothes
by
Nancy Pulley
Mementos
wait
in
the family home
for
me to muster up some kind
of
ancestral tough love--
throw
away the past.
How
many keepsakes
do
I need to sift through
to
find a solid lump of grief?
How
many tchotchkes
will
fit in an already crowded shadowbox?
I’m
trying to find comfort
in
postcards sent
to
my grandmother,
Mom’s
handmade doilies,
in
the metal closet where
my
sister’s clothes hang empty
waiting
to be placed
in
that old wooden
storage
trunk of my heart.
Nancy
Pulley's
poems have appeared in Tipton Poetry Journal, the Indiannual, Flying
Island, Arts Indiana Literary Supplement, Passages North, Plainsong,
the Sycamore Review, and the Humpback Barn Festival collection. In
1992, she won the Indiana Writers Center poetry chapbook contest,
resulting in the publication of a chapbook, Tremolo of Light.