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The Smoking Gun
The drawer bit me, it had teeth.
Inside, my aunt’s stash of family photos.
A picture of me at my parents’ wedding.
She never allowed me to touch the ballerina,
Sugar-coated, sweet-smelling, sharp as a razor,
Spinning loudly.
My aunt Vera lived in a suburb called Ćava.
And, of course, that was another girl in the picture, not me.
I was born four years later, if you must know.
She gave me a pair of pointy pumps from the 50s.
She would give me anything I asked for, except the ballerina.
A gift from her ex-husband, she said.
The ballerina was not made of sugar because I tasted it.
I still wanted it more than anything else.
The neighbour came to the door to ask for tea.
She had ladder stones,
which made no sense.
The bitter tea of remorse, my aunt said.
By that time, I was busy diggng through the drawer
and I’d given up trying to understand.
The gun was so beautiful and not a toy.
She let me touch it, then took it away.
Another gift from her ex-husband, she explained.
She gave me the bullets and I played with them for hours.
My Twelve Sons will not repeat my mistakes, she told my mother,
while she slid the guilty-looking bullets into the drawer.
So, later in life I was careful
never to put on as much weight as she had.
Mojih dvanaest sinova, she used to call me,
because that’s how much I was worth to her.
The ballerina ran away on a stormy night,
or, at least, that’s what they told me
and I refused to believe anything else.
My aunt had run away on such a stormy night.
At 15, you don’t know what love is,
my mother said.
I am sure that gun would tell a different story.
Her husband had given it to her for protection.
She almost killed him by mistake one day.
I thought that was the most romantic of all stories.
GloPoWriMo Day 8 - Twenty Little Poetry Projects
The procedure is a little involved and you can find out more about it here.
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