Four Poems

An Appetite for Silver

My grandmother pilfered dimes and brooches,
lining them under the runner’s loose corner.
To her mother, the reason was obvious.
The baker kept a magpie in the rafter.
No sooner had she slid her coins
across the counter, the bird dislodged,
brushing silken blackness past her hand.
The shock shivered down to a half-finished thing,
my grandmother shaped by first impressions.

Would you believe if I told you she became
a jeweller? That the appetite kept up her whole life,
though she was still, in those days,
a practical woman, wrapping daughters in twin furs
during earthquakes, their bodies nearly crushed
by the grand piano. The next morning,
...