Donald Illich
Grandma Thinks of Love | Movie Monsters
Though grandmother died twenty years ago
she still thinks of love. Her heart’s healed
from the attack that killed her, and her spirit
knits itself into a star-filled blanket, which
keeps romantic memories nice and warm.
Her husband has moved on. He sleeps on a
couch-shaped cloud where lightning sometimes
flashes, a TV show he won’t wake to turn off.
Even dreaming of his favorite meal won’t
summon him back to her. He has a big bag
of sorrows to digest. She knows a strong soul
by another tombstone who whittles a bone
into the shape of her face. He’s lived here
only a year, still tries to contact the living by
writing “help” on a blown piece of litter,
wilting a daffodil on his grave into a cross,
a smile, a ring. Nonetheless, he keeps busy,
which attracts my grandma. Only a man
who beats back the afterlife with angry hands,
needs to stay on the earth despite his fate,
can wrap himself in her constellation, while
we pause at her old memorial, wonder idly
where she is, what she’s doing, right now.
The lives of horror movie monsters worried me.
After terrorizing townspeople the Wolfman
returned home to find cold bones on the table,
a sarcastic note by his bowl, “I bet you scared them
good this time.” Frankenstein woke straight-up
from nightmares about torches, ill-will-beacons
summoning him toward flames. The Mummy
did his taxes, calculating thousands of years
of refunds he’d get back. I never had a chance
to dress as one of them. My fake mask nearly
suffocated me. I could barely see my way to
candy houses. Mom tried her best. She glued
carpet tufts to my cheap plastic face, stole
over-sized thrift shop clothes so I could look
like a giant. She even wrapped me in brown tape,
which quickly peeled off before I could strike
fear in anyone. As I stumbled down chipped
sidewalks, avoiding stylish vampire friends,
I wondered if monsters’ mothers outfitted them
for student life: a school uniform disguising
stitches and scars, a special retainer fixing fangs,
a second skin allowing the pharaoh to learn
geometry, the depths of his pyramid home.
Donald Illich has published poetry in The Iowa Review, Fourteen Hills, Passages North, Roanoke Review, Pinyon, and Cold Mountain Review. His work will appear in future issues of Nimrod, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Combo, and The Sulphur River Literary Review. He received a Prairie Schooner scholarship to the 2006 Nebraska Summer Writer’s Conference.
