5 May 2007 | Vol. 7, No. 1

To His Nephew

by ROBERT OSTROM

In my bureau is a matchbox. I am not going to make this easy for you. In the box there are two cloves, a snip of lavender, and a piece of ribbon. Inside the ribbon, a girl walks tiptoe with outstretched arms past the living room. She is my grandmother. In her pocket, a cinnamon quill and kitchen shears; in the bend of her arm, kith and kin: her grandfather carefully opens a butterfly case in which hearing apparatus of various mammals are pinned. From their twisted bone-skein he hears something like metal and bird in a hallway. I am telling you because you want to be told. It’s the chink (do you hear) of a pocket case of minor operating instruments in an old man’s hand. He walks toward his wife who braces herself on the spiral baluster. Around her neck they say she wore a bite of arsenic in a locket. But I know inside the pendant her mother sleeps beside my eldest sister. Tonight, you will sleep in your room because you are tired and because you do not believe me.