Family Portrait with Forsythia and Hunting Rifle
BY NANCY REDDY
Some of us are missing. There’s a bride
but not in white. My mother’s in blue,
the slender straps, the rich
and rumpled linen. She’s a splinter.
Her sister’s chosen floral
for her second wedding, she’s chosen a man
who wears camo to the Shop & Save,
who listens to John Denver and cleans his guns
in the unheated basement. As best as I remember,
he was kind. None of us knows what happens
behind the locked doors of our neighbors’ houses.
We were raised in the strip malls suburbs, land of
cul de sacs and smooth tan sidewalks.
We were raised to believe that violence
was what happened elsewhere. When the camera
finally catches us we’re blinking into the late-August sun,
the forsythia by the side porch blooming
in a sickly sweetness, though it’s the wrong season
for that, so the memory bends and ripples.
There’s a knot inside the synapse
where remembering should be. Years later,
after so many other things went wrong,
the groom’s son came into his father’s room
and shot him as he slept. They lived
close to us. I could, at thirteen, have walked
there after school. I never did. It was the suburbs,
no one walked anywhere. There were guns
in our house, too.
