Country Crystal
by
Casey Ford
Casey Ford
Casey Ford will complete her M.A. in December 2015 at Lamar University, where she also teaches basic writing and freshman composition. Her master's thesis is an opera libretto entitled Mauberly and based on Ezra Pound's biography. Her sonnet series entitled "As Best I Can Recall" recently won the CCTE Texas poetry prize, and she hopes to attend the Sewanee Writer's Conference this summer as a scholarship recipient.
Welch's used to put its jam in jars—
and maybe they still do, I wouldn't know—
the kind that you could wash and use again
as glassware. Country crystal, if you will.
My gran-mere had a set of twenty-four.
Tall and clear, they held her special tea.
She'd wrap a glass in paper towels to stop
the sweat from ruining her best nightgowns.
"This tea has medicine," she'd sing to us
in bourbon tongue,
"Is not for little girls."
Her swishing, swoozy accent swirled around
her lips; her whiskied French enraptured me.
Dead at 59, cirrhosis got her.
No child inherits what I offer here,
so take it for your own, this final draft,
rewritten so I live my years and hers.
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