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Prairie Schooner 78.1 (2004) 100



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A Christmas Story ... of a Sort

Sharon Chmielarz


For behold, Erika's Christmas cactus blooms again,
long after her death and its journey to our house
from her apartment where the cactus flourished,
in the room's desert air, the way some refugees do,
crossing borders like years, arriving at a window
after a long, dark spell on a re-named street.

Then, to live, in denial of the room behind one's back,
a firetrap of cords, some snaking up wall, some,
along a baseboard, one, taped, extended to
a table. Near the cot a coquette of a white slip
clung on a hook to a lady's gray seersucker suit,
found in the bundle from a rummage sale.

"I was frivolous once," Erika used to sigh, as if
time were fragrant, or water, sipped from a china
cup in the German academy in St. Petersburg.
That was before 1917. Long before a stroke
did her in, before the world stood her up,
turned frivolous twit into Putzfrau, high-nosed

bearer of an American resthome's shit pans.-
So who would have thought after a long,
silent exile, a flowering would return
to Erika's cactus with such éclat? Risen
on stems, dry as Jesse's root, belting out
protest at any absence of light in the world.






Sharon Chmielarz's most recent book is The Other Mozart (Ontario Review P). She is the author of three other books and lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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