EXCERPTS FROM ANTIQUE SOUTHERN CAMEOS
For Alan Bennett and for Deborah
Forgiveness was sitting in your kitchen when you got home, and now rests elbows on the table to watch you reach for a knife. You scrape the papery skin from a ginger root and slice it into thin coins.
-Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, from “The Houseguest”1
“Lynn’s Birthday Roses.” Copyright © 2025 Deborah G. Munro. Reprinted with permission. Image caption: Manipulated high-resolution color photograph. A cluster of light pink roses is shown diffusely on a black background. JPG file (3000 x 2000 pixels, 10” x 6.67” at 300 dpi) of the image. The original photograph is 6000 x 4000 pixels, or 20” x 13.33”.
from “BOOK I: Cutting Crucifixes”
I. The Curtain Going Up
“WHAT’S NOT TO LOVE ABOUT THEATER?” a friend writes. The smell of dust, the thick curtain in many folds. It is so like love. What’s not to love about theatre? LARGE.
It is a snowy night in Manhattan, 1953. We three are going to see Siobhan McKenna in St. Joan by SHAW. Tips are good.
Side apartment to myself, mainly while Mother took Kara to violin lessons. I would put the thirty-three-and-a-third vinyls onto the turntable in the valise.
It is worth any struggle to see the Irish actress who is the first woman I have ever loved.
Language is a bull coming from you from every angle. She was my secret romance. Never having gone to high school I never had a crush. But I heard McKenna’s voice and played the Irish poet, Yeats, repeatedly, on the turntable. When I was alone, it was a treat to have the West End apartment to myself. I’d turn the lights down low, close my eyes, and listen. These were my revelations, my rush of first love. I was in love with a girl, memorized every line of Yeats’ poems, and copied the Irish accent.
Body glitter was out an age past, yet a friend writes she will wear loud pink with glitter to remind her she’s alive. Rowena and I, we were hardly a pair of petticoats.
“I am in the winter of my life.” I told Rowena. “You are in the autumn.”
Blue is humanity’s favorite color, and no wonder. It’s everywhere: the sky, the sea that makes our earth resemble a Big Blue Marble, the Internet (That Dress: “I’m looking for a man in finance/trust fund/6’ 5”/blue eyes”). It’s jeans and velvet and a hundred-year-old, critically contested rhapsody and William Gas’s bawdy 1976 “inquiry.”
Outside, iron-dark snow, forged by cold. Costumes thrown on, old child rising from bed, flesh falling from body, given over, death shove. Endless costumes. What’s not to love?
Waking, she is slow. And it’s a very busy bed. I ask, “you okay?” She says, “I think of Nikita who fell down the stairs. It could have been worse. But Nikita wore an iron maiden for six weeks. Remember?”
I wish I could get last year’s Christmas tree, already boxed, away. But I say nothing. I let the box collect dust. Like the unread books I bought in a burst of joy. Unclasp your sorrows to yourself, I remind myself, and share your joys with others.
“What do we have for dinner tonight?” I ask her.
“My surprise yesterday, I wore purple…what shall we…?”
“Take another tablet.”
She smiles with motherlove. But it is Auschwitz Remembrance Day, and I recall the feel in my palm of the ticket my sister brought back from Dachau. She was giving a concert there. All the conductors cast their eyes to the ground when the musicians asked her where it was. She recalls rows and rows of crosses and one Jewish star. “How could you?” I ask. That was fifty years ago.
“Shall I open the window?” Row asks. It’s our one elation, dawn, frost on roofs. Our difficulties are ghosts, throwing shadows. I look at Rowena again. Our lives cannot be so sad as two bad spines. What’s not to love? I say to myself, strolling down the screen to Sol Travel and England’s most enchanting town, Banbury, with its chocolate box villages.
II. Barely Barley
If I was the LaTour girl holding a candle, if I was Vermeer’s girl with the pearl earring, mother was the steel porcupine whose needles lodged in my spine. As a steel creature, she showed off acts that were cruel, indigestible. But my sister and I were always stitching plans.
Mother moved under a wedding cake ceiling. She hailed from strawberry hill. She moved for a swatch of drama. I waited with the silence of a bird-watcher. I remind myself of the year Percival the peacock we nicknamed Percy haunted our neighborhood and flaunted his plumage in courtship. Was mother always in a veiled kind of courtship? Mother, Kara and I—none of us would be dulled out by life. I myself like a splash of drama, so Rowena loops a 1920 pendant around my neck, reminiscent of searchlights on the river during the war.
How can I communicate my hermit-hood to Kara? How to get through a day without spinal atrophy It is she, Rowena. Old Norman churches, old pegs for hats. There is, too, soul-weariness that sets in. I am crazy-starved for change. As is said in Somerset, long live the hedgerows. I don’t want to wish I’d been kinder if I get another life. I blow the sparks that are visible.
“Good lord willing and the creeks don’t rise, I will make tomorrow’s visit,” I say, crossing the bar of midnight into early dawn. Hope there’s frost on the roof. Row has given me a book of woodcuts of Shakespeare’s birds. The thing is not to slip over the edge at our age. Seven and eight decades. Miss a stitch like hopscotch. We cancel the visit, skipping this chat about how hope had gone walkabout anyway.
Children’s games. Today a baby sings in the library beneath us. Piping voices rise, “O my darling.” I feel rich as God listening, recall ink down South, how girls were taught the waltz.
“I had a nightmare again last night,” she says. “I was forgetting the names for words.” And to think, she just brought me a larger magnifying glass. That the small be magnified, the large demised. “It’s nothing,” I say of the pain that wrenches me awake at two in the new day. And the small wildflower I stood in a glass becomes huge, color everywhere. A favorite, it has been found, blue.
The whole month of January has been blowing. Thinking of the cancellation, I ask Rowena, “do you think it’s true that old people are treated like children?” “Sometimes,” she says. The air sharpens to a winter blade as we near noon, the kind you use to incise the crucifix into Brussels sprouts.
“What to do about dinner?” I ask. I add, “We haven’t had barley in a long time.” She’s Scot in heritage, at least, and it is Robert Burns’ Month. And I will luve thee still, my dear, till a’ the seas gang dry.
The woman who became a conductor was given a box of batons on her fourteenth birthday. The sort of gift my mother would have given. Yes, she who lifted a stuffed giraffe and said, “This is what happens when women grow old together.” She went for the jugular, always. “And you two are terrible cooks.” That’s okay. Somewhere I read that Lesbians are good cooks.
Well, I think sometimes that I immigrate every day. I was not given ministerial reprieve. I did make the two endlessly painful trips to Seattle, did lie awake having drunk too much, crying, stabbing the pillow. But I landed.
Row said, “Loren has landed.” And here I am. A new raspberry sweater for my eighty-sixth birthday next month, piles of books, an orange crate at the foot of my bed containing my books, and a view to die for. I nearly did die. But I do not miss a trick of the village. The cameo custodian night comes. Is it about forgiveness, dashing that glass of scotch, squinting my eyes, or mist? And I made an impressionistic painting of those railroad tracks, like hands in prayer, now, in the emergency shelter of old age. A little bird will sleep on our windowsill again before I die.
I have time to revisit history. I inherited Jewish outrage, talent, and voice. They come together to meet. It is my dread that they come together to meet. It is my dream country altering. Onward! Row has a sore knee, I cannot get to the wheelchair to wheel, the sky lowers, it will snow. There are Rowena’s Shakespeare’s flowers by the bed. So—what’s not to love?
Note
- Copyright © 2025 by Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 23, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
Editor’s Note: The excerpts above have been published—in some cases, in slightly different forms—in Antique Southern Cameos (Cyberwit.net, 2025) and are reprinted in Wordgathering with the author’s permission.
Read poetry by Lynn Strongin and fiction by other writers in this issue of Wordgathering.
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About the Author
Born and raised in New York City to first-generation Jewish immigrants from Ukraine and Romania, Lynn Strongin contracted polio at age twelve and is paralyzed from the waist down. She earned a Bachelor’s with Honors from Hunter College and a Master of Arts from Stanford University. Lynn won a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Grant. She has published twelve books, her work appears in thirty or so anthologies, she worked for the American poet Denise Levertov, and she received encouragement from Kay Boyle, Robert Duncan, and Robert Frost. Lynn was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her book, Spectral Freedom. Reflecting on Strongin’s poetry, Laura Chester, co-editor of Rising Tides: 20th Century American Women Poets (Simon and Schuster, 1973), writes, “Outrage, talent, and voice meld together into something sublime, like an unearthly blue, rising above pain to create images that are so pure, they almost hurt. Is this prose or is this poetry, or perhaps a new form altogether, one that rises above and goes beyond?” Danielle Ofri, M.D., Ph.D., author of What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine (Beacon Press, 2014) and Editor of the Bellevue Literary Review, notes of Strongin’s memoir, “In this tender and probing memoir, Lynn Strongin traces a life shaped by illness, upheaval, and the quiet resilience of language Navigating the aftermath of polio, the ache of dislocation, and the long shadow of loss, she probes how memory and poetry can both fracture and mend the self.”
About the Photographer
Deborah Munro has been taking photographs since she “borrowed” her father’s Argus rangefinder camera at 15. She takes photos to help her truly see the world around her. She lives in Victoria, B.C.