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Separation Other people gather in parks and churches for family reunions, but my family gathers at the Campbell Funeral Home. Strange, yet fitting, I suppose, since our ancestors on the other side are gathering. "How's my Will ... did he amount to anything? And Laura Lou ... did she grow up pretty like her mama?" At one reunion two handsome brothers sat with their father, shy smiles embracing distant cousins. And wedged between them there on the blue sofa in Campbell's Funeral Parlor was the shadow of a third brother. Child ofdivorce, my grandfather's namesake, split off by a stepmother's jealousy sharper than the boat that brought the first of us from our homeland and by a mother's bitterness uglier than death staring at us out of that bronze coffin. He'll never be able to sit on the porch steps of the old homeplace plowed and harrowed, planted, harvested, pulling up dreams out of brogan paths. Never be able to read the love letter hanging in Aunt Clara's living room, the letter granddaddy sent grandma during the Civil War, words pretty enough to hold onto and lasting as a lifetime. Ancestral roots have been poisoned by a piece of paper legalizing separation. —Gretchen McCroskey So You Want to Write? Let me get you a hacksaw. And you'll need fireweed in your hut of bones. Make a sign that says NO INTERFERENCE. Intimacy income infants: all must go. Your job is to concentrate like coal and lie, seedful and leaflost , like humus. And you'll have to train as a chain-seer ready to wake up in ditches pockets out, heart sleeved in stitches, not knowing wrong from left or right from written, begging paper to stanch the wound of words. —George Ella Lyon 66 ...

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