~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Ed Brickell

Enough

You had sat at our tables for decades,

until one day in the midst of a story told many times,

you carried a flickering question

through the crumpling hallways of yourself,

and you answered, enough. And as we continued

to pass the plates and tell the stories,

you listened to your growing silence, then dropping everything

as if to say, you’re not listening, your stillness at first unheard

among the clacking Fiestaware collected through three generations,

each embossing thinner than the grandmother before.

How do we decide to turn our head to the wall? I can still taste

the lemon icebox pie at that Memphis restaurant by the railroad track,

the chefs and servers holding hands in a circle and praying,

or my first-born daughter, lifted shivering and bloody

into the light, the sweet tang of a tongue’s tip caressing my own

as you and I swayed in a kitchen, a swallowtail the size of a bird,

tasting blooms on my grandfather’s casket while the minister spoke,

the silent weeping of my father, its great black and yellow wings

opening, closing when our eyes widened briefly

in clumsy astonishment, then resuming the meals and the days,

hours opening, closing like wings slowly drying, waiting for us

to put down the bright bowls, to have had enough.

Ed Brickell's poetry has most recently been shared or will be shared soon in Flint Hills Review, Susurrus, Hiram Poetry Review, Book of Matches, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, and others. He lives in Dallas, Texas.