Karma

by Helena Bell

 

My mother still suffers nightmares
of blue silk birds. The ones

my grandmother Gan shook in her face
shrieking, "The birds are coming!"

back in 1963. She was 10.
I was 10 the year they filmed

JFK in Gan's house. Even now,
my family blames Oliver Stone

for rheumatoid arthritis.
How it pulls Gan's fingers

away from her thumbs,
swells the knuckles. At night

unhooking her bra
her hands spread

like shadow puppets
of birds.

 

© 2006 Helena Bell

A New Orleanian by birth, Helena Bell currently resides in Carbondale, IL where she is working towards an MFA in poetry at SIU. Her poems have appeared in Strange Horizons, Ideomancer, and on her grandmother's refrigerator.