Drachma

Laura Kasischke | 13 I’m not interested in a single thing in this museum case. Not that coin, filthy, ancient. Not that little marble phallus. Not this tiny Isis, or this Byzantine slave bracelet, or that blue-­ green shard of Roman glass. What I want is that lost shoebox full of faded snapshots back. But I moved too many times when I was young. Couldn’t settle. Didn’t care. A friend’s garage. My ex’s basement. A rented storage shed. And now my grandfather is still there, waiting in a worn-­ out chair, half-­ awake, a book closed in his lap. He poetry Drachma Laura Kasischke 14 | Laura Kasischke held strange beliefs and drank too much. Collected things. He made a lot of noise the day he died. I was a child, not in the room itself, but also not outside. Years later my mother would admit it might have been wrong to leave a kid in front of a television set for seven hours, listening to that. But I was sloppy drunk when she said this, and she was dying, too, by then, and if I hadn’t been so careless for so long with my possessions, I could show you now a photo of his face. Instead, it’s in some box I left someplace. Some Greek soldier’s drachma, wasted. Some Roman housewife’s broken vase. ...