Gravel at Every Turn
by Annette Sisson
I visit my mother’s ghost,
feel her prompting, fingertip
under my left rib—It’s time
to talk to your father. It will
be easier now that he’s gone.
Four weeks ago, rain
pummeled the tent above
my father’s walnut coffin.
A broad maple dripped
beside the double monument,
inscription carved in granite,
final date still blank.
Dad and I always swerved
our way through conversation,
gravel at every turn,
but today I ask about his journey
since the morning he crossed
over, pause to listen. His last
birthday, wisps of candle smoke
curling, he asked me What
do you think happens?—batted
his question like a birdie across
net. I said I didn’t know,
Divine mystery? Before I
could nudge him to say what
he thought, he eased back
in the recliner, nodded off,
his closed mouth a straight line.
Annette Sisson’s poems appear in The Penn Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Rust & Moth, Cider Press Review, West Trade Review, and many other journals and anthologies. Her second book, Winter Sharp with Apples, was published by Terrapin Books (2024), and her third book manuscript, Rhizomes and Bones, is currently seeking a publisher. In 2019 she won The Porch Writers’ Collective’s poetry prize, and since then she has won and placed in numerous contests.
