I remember
Gran’s bony hands gripping my wriggling wrists
Crossing streets,
Watching my parents leave for business trips
Screaming, crying and kicking at their departure
Gran held me firm in place poker faced
Family additions
Dragged away like furniture:
Made felt like I was the fist that punctured the peace,
A surgically removed cyst from familial bliss.

Trying to demonstrate
That she was not as straight
As die, rulers, skyscrapers, line geometry,
My one time fathers frivolities
Preoccupied my attention
Until austerity crept back into her manner,
A gulf snatching me away from her temporary lapse,
Her gnarly hand seizing my shoulder.
Her part played to a fading friend and children gone

Continental drift.
Ocean crossings for funeral celebrations
Ravines forming in her fathomless foundations
Avoided my attention
Bright wrapping paper covered my childhood perception,
There was no melancholic manic depression
no lashing out with verbal accusations of abandonment.
Isolation.

Bubble wrap layers of armour; parental protection
steadily cast off in adolescence,
Left me reeling with raw emotion after seeing my grandmother broken.
My father staring at the TV ignoring the reality of her sanity,
It is easier coping with the match score rather than the eyesore.
Sitting in silence sooner than covering circular topics exhausted.
This is the most either can hope for, every move calculated, deliberated.

She waits for death so she can be liberated
He waits for deaths so he can live again
In memories reclaimed,
bony hands gripping wrists,
Establishing familial bliss,
My one time grandmother’s frivolities ,
A collection of her life’s mythology,
Not the sum of her anthology.
We will rewrite her biography.