by Jan Hazen Hanson
Crisp White Sheet
She died in the night while I was sleeping
and this morning, two polite men in dark suits
come from the funeral home, wrap her body
in a white sheet, take her down the hall
on a rolling gurney, away from the bedroom
where sunlight still warms her empty bed,
out the front door into the cool morning,
the long black car waiting at the curb.
And there she goes, under a crisp white sheet,
white as the sheets that hung from the clothesline
in the bright sun on a day when I was three,
handing her clothespins as she reached into a
chipped porcelain basin for more damp dish towels
and pillowcases to hang.
There was No One to Meet
I go to visit my third cousin, once removed.
Tommy Hodges, an Irish man still living
in the house where he was born in Allihies
almost eighty years ago. I call through the open
front door. He lumbers down concrete steps,
greets me, wipes out two tumblers with a dish towel,
pours red wine. We sit in his kitchen,
me on a built-in wooden bench, plastic-covered cushion,
he in a straight-back chair next to the stove.
Two pairs of glasses hang from a pipe on the wall.
He reaches for the bottom pair, shows me a letter
written by Evelyn, an aunt who moved to Tasmania years ago,
the letter aged to a shiny silk from all its years in the kitchen
with the steam from the kettle and heat from the flame.
He talks of when he and his brother Willy worked their dairy farm
sixteen cows, always sixteen cows, milked by hand
until they brought in the machines and made a building for them,
then the milk quotas came, and later Willy became very sick.
It was a sad day, Tommy says, when they had to let the cows go.
“Did you ever marry?” I ask.
He turns away. “There was no one to meet.”
Jan Hanson is a retired HR director living in Santa Ana, California. Her poetry reflects her personal history, work life and passion for justice, with work appearing in Anacapa Review, Quartet, Women in a Golden State, and LAdige Review. Her chapbook is I’ll Never Play the Hammered Dulcimer [Finishing Line Press, 2019]
