USC's Online Chapbook Poets
Nan Lundeen

Nan Lundeen’s poetry has been published in literary magazines, including the College of Charleston’s  Illuminations, The Petigru Review, Psychotic Education and online in Iowa Writes. She is a staff writer for The Greenville News, and lives in Greer with her husband, Ron DeKett, and their keeshond, Que T.

Manuscript Title: Black Dirt Days

Mathilda Lundeen

The wintergreen she rubbed into her knee
mingled
with roses.

I still see her
at age eighty, picking up her skirts
and wading through the creek
to search out
shy ferns hidden in the bluffs.

Or gathering the eggs
scratching chicken dirt with her fingernail,
“Bosh, a little manure can’t hurt you.”

She argued with her children
stalked upstairs, blue eyes
ablaze,
insisted on molasses in the rye.

Her mother died
when she was eight
and Gram saw her
one night on the stairs.

In her rocking chair, stitching
quilt blocks,
That was Judith’s party dress
and that Aunt Clara’s apron,
she wove
long stories
about Cynthia’s cow, goblins, and British generals—

Snuggled close in bed
we whispered late at night
about romance, boyfriends.
I don’t trust that one.
Eyes too close together.

She was right.

Aunt Ada’s Ample Ass and the Year the Mississippi Flooded

Too bad Uncle Benny wasn’t around
the year the Mississippi unquelled

by sandbags, levies, and walls
teeming with rain and rats and hell’s balls

rose into his back yard.
Uncle Benny and his tired heart

were long gone by then
down that other, darker river.

Aunt Ada was left all alone
on Lark Street in Clinton, Iowa

with her thinning hair and her recipes
and her pension from the lumber company.

Aunt Ada filled sandbags night after night
down there on the levy

against the river’s relentless rise
into North Clinton and her own back yard.

Uncle Benny had been a card—
hair the color of a sandbar

grip like a vice, smile like a lynx
slap on the back! Hi! Howareya?

I was six when Ma and Pa and me
walked in their door for a visit.

Want a piece of Aunt Ada’s apple pie?
Home-made, fresh-baked.

Sincere smile, sweet ole guy.
The grown-ups shifted from foot to foot

while I pondered the offer.
I didn’t quite trust Uncle Benny,

but my mouth had begun to water.
M-mm, Aunt Ada’s apple pie.

Now, Aunt Ada, you understand
had eaten plenty of pie—

apple or otherwise.
But Uncle Benny was short and skinny

like a red-haired river rat.
That day I nibbled on his bait—

Yes, sir, I replied, I’ll have some pie.
Ah! Ha! he clapped his thigh,

We ain’t got any!
Like I said, he was dead

by the time the river rose
so high even Aunt Ada

shoveled sand on the levy
in the rain all aching night long.

People came from all around;
they shoveled and they bagged

and still the Mississippi rose
relentless into back yards.

On Lark Street in North Clinton
Aunt Ada tacked a screen

over the toilet seat.
Never seen anything like it—

the river, the mud, the rats—
the horror stories—

coffins floating down side streets;
rats appearing in toilet bowls.

Poor Aunt Ada in the middle
of those long, moonless nights

checking quick before she
snatched up the screen

and sat down to strain
with all her might—

quick, quick, no time to wipe.
Why did it have to be Aunt Ada’s ample ass

vulnerable on that commode?
I wanted it to be Uncle Benny

sitting there on a moonless night
benignly unaware, while the Mississippi grows

and a river rat’s grin gloats
inches from his sweet behind.

He could offer that friendly fellow
a piece of apple pie.

The Women in our Family Wore Corsets

Aunt Geneva damp from her bath
tosses more powder
into the breach,
yanks, shifts, pulls,
dances from leg to leg
like a sumo wrestler
fighting with that damn corset
on her wedding day.

Gram poses on the sidewalk
at Geneva and Alvin’s farm
head high, twinkle in her eye.
I know
her proud bearing
is staved up by a corset
under her flowered dress
and in one brassiere cup
she has stuffed a balled up sock.
I know because I sit on her bed
cross-legged
and watch her dress
fascinated by the
flap of skin that used to be her breast
watching me like the deformed lid of a lazy eye.

If Gram and Geneva knew I told you this
they would be mortified.

Crate

Robert’s Dairy
Omaha, Nebraska
Misuse Punishable by Law

What’s the deal here?
An old, red plastic crate
announces it will not be misused
or the misuser shall go straight to jail.

Maybe pay a fine, I think.

What is misuse of a red, plastic crate?

Does jurisprudence have
an opinion on red plastic crates?
What is the crate canon?

Let us apply reason:
the crate was meant only for milk
and other use constitutes misuse.

Now I’m worried and confused—
what about cream and cottage cheese?
My God, what about yogurt?
Does feta step over the line?

I strongly suspect
my scribbled poems
and ideas smudged on the backs of napkins
are violations.

That sets me to worrying
about the crate police.
Will they knock on my door
in the middle of the night armed with a warrant?
Do they have a right to search?
What constitutes probable cause?
I suspect being a poet
is cause enough.

But surely this is paranoia
and what counts
is that I have always been
kind to the crate
although once I made it carry a cactus.

The Feral Mother

Light falls upon the floor
when the refrigerator door huffs open
and the woman I thought was my mother
stands sucking her fingers
smeared with tuna salad.

She has become a night feeder.

At two a.m. I watch
from my bed on her floral couch. It’s been
two months since I’ve seen her
and I expected to find my mother—
Mother who cringed from touching raw meat,
who was so crazy-clean
she excavated corners of the kitchen floor with the
point of a paring knife.

This woman rears back,
slams the door, turns to discover
a human form on her couch;
smearing tuna on her nightgown
she hunches toward me—

leans into me;
I feel the eyes
bulging,
puzzled by a stranger pretending to sleep
on her floral couch.

Tongue Woman

During dinner
I am at Mother’s elbow
at her spot
under the clock—
the round table
filled with old women.
Who were they
before they grew too old?

An aide in dark brown
brings Betty Jane
a small dish of mashed potatoes.
Betty Jane’s tongue
hangs to her chin
pink and fat and lightly coated.
It is hard
to think of Betty Jane
as anything but Tongue Woman
yet she hands me
the small bowl—
“I always share
my mashed potatoes with her—”
she sends the tongue
in Mother’s direction.

During dinner,
while I cut Mother’s ham sandwich
into small bites
because her teeth are being repaired,
we talk about baking
on the farm.
Betty Jane baked cinnamon coffee cake
and bread and pies,
milked cows every morning.
We share how much work
it was to wash the separator that culled
cream from fresh milk.
“You had to get those discs
back in just right,”
pipes up Pauline
who has been silent until now.

Betty Jane tells how they
had homemade whipped cream
so rich, she
used it alone to fill a pie.
Her husband had a fit.
A whipping cream pie!
“That pie was so good”—
Tongue flashed again—
and when she made cake
and had no time for frosting,
she put out a big bowl of whipped
cream on the farm table,
and the men loved it.
Whipped cream on their cake.
Tongue takes a lick.
“We never worried about calories then,”
Betty Jane says.
“Oh, goodness, no, we never thought
of it,” Pauline says.

When dinner is over
the last of the sherbet eaten
or rejected—
“We’re out of ice cream,”
the aide says, and Hulda asks
for the fourteenth time,
“What time is it?
Will somebody tell me what time it is?
It’s a terrible thing not to be able to see,”
the tongue patiently responds,
“twenty after five.”

“Thank you,” Hulda says.
Mother wipes her nose
on the tablecloth.
She and shy Lily watch the ladies
roll and hobble to their rooms
down hallways as long as
the path the cows took home.

The tables are cleared,
including the tablecloths.
Mother sings
“You are my sunshine”
tapping the table—
Lily says, “Where are we
going?  Do you know where
we’re going?”

Mother takes Lily’s hand.
Lily has big eyes and curly hair,
wears a black blouse stained with orange sherbet,

turns her wheels toward Mother,
“Where are we going?
Do you know where we’re going?
Oh! Your hands are warm.”

“And your hands are cold,” Mother says.
Lily’s eyes say yes.
“Cold hands, warm heart,”
Mother says, sincerely.
Lily smiles,
and fear scuttles out of the room.

Nightfall in DeWitt, Iowa

The last sidewalk
led past
a hobbyhorse
in a lighted window.

The red sky
bled into black earth
and a lone pole light
cast its cone upon a fallow field.