Squaretable Seminars

My granny used to speed skate on the marble clouds
of lake ice in Michigan. Her pine forest backyard
was perfect for blueberries and bears to course
through alongside enough tales of Paul Bunyan a landfill
couldn’t swallow them. She used her piece of the pie
to attend nursing school and passed with passion, not luck.

She once dated JFK, and patted the Enola Gay for luck
before it took off to deliver the mushroom clouds.
Years later she taught me to make her UP blueberry pie
in Wisconsin, and we fed the birds bread in the backyard.
Her wedding dress, now since living in a landfill,
was sewn out of Japanese parachute silk, of course

homemade, like her calligraphies that course
along her wedding program. It was some luck
that we salvaged the paper from ending up in the landfill
the winter the washer malfunctioned and invisible clouds
poured rain downstairs. We had to use the backyard
to sort out the basement’s treasures into a lopsided pie

of melted photographs, squishy sideboards, rusted pie
tins, and unmendable clothes. Through the course
of a thousand trips to the dumpster behind the backyard
we cleaned up the memories. The only luck
we had consisted of paper towels to soak up the clouds
of moisture that molded in puddles. Maybe the landfill

had a special place for broken Susie Smart: a landfill
hospital for easy bake ovens that burned the pie
and were retired to the basement after too many clouds
of char wafted out. We found sketches from the art course
that she took at a college women’s week, and as luck
would have it, the Xmas decorations evaded the backyard

too. The basement door opened onto the backyard
the way her house design planned, just beside the landfill
drop point for clothes at the mangle iron. Maybe luck
kept the nosy Polack neighbors away when the pizza pie
called us inside to eat. The clown makeup, of course,
disintegrated, and the cotton crèche set clouds

matted down in the backyard pile. Her pumpkin pie
and other recipes survived the landfill, in due course
of family memory, a good luck sign to taunt the clouds.


© Hannah Walleser