"Bookshelves" by James Benger
Mom wanted new bookshelves
for Christmas.
When we were kids,
all her dime store, third-hand
paperback Stephen Kings and
Clive Barkers and that
massive Poe collection that’s
now on my bedside table,
they were kept on a sheet of plywood
suspended by a couple stacks of
cinder blocks in the basement
right between the furnace and the coal chute.
Pretty sure the fire department
didn’t know about that.
So when she asked,
being somewhat aware of finances,
but mostly in need of being useful,
I offered:
“I can make you some bookshelves.
Dad and I can get the wood.”
Mom, who spent her early childhood
living in an abandoned school bus,
Mom, who at twelve years old
marveled at the concept of an
indoor commode,
Mom, who would tuck me in at night,
in that drafty, hole-ridden trailer,
with its homemade septic tank
before the house with the
basement and coal cute,
she turned and said to me:
“I think I’ve had about enough of
homemade shit.
I think for once I’d like
something from a store.”
On December 25, there were
two bright, shining, pressboard,
faux-wood paneled bookshelves
in the living room.
I’m not sure where they came from,
but I’m pretty confident
some assembly was required.
"Trucks" by James Benger
Grandma had this compulsion
to constantly buy random crap
for the grandkids.
Crammed in my mom’s old room,
lovingly redubbed “Grandma’s Bedroom,”
not because she slept there;
it was simply packed to the gills
with her useless shit,
you’d find healing crystals,
and Ghostbuster colorforms,
a knockoff version of Connect Four,
and that pocket knife
she confiscated from me
when I was eight.
A year or thereabouts
after she was in the ground,
after we finally accepted
we couldn’t keep the place
like she wanted,
while cleaning it out
(some of the stuff in the
dirt floor basement had been there
since the late 1800s),
we find an unopened value pack
of matchbox trucks.
Time moves on,
I forget about most of the stuff
we found in that crumbling shack
the city technically condemned
after the coal mine explosion
of 1930-something.
I did hang on to Mom’s old algebra notebook,
only ‘cause it’s in her hand,
and the cover is of the early Beatles,
and the doodles of teenage Mom
mooning over 1963 John.
One day my dad pulls out that
pack of trucks Grandma must’ve bought
sometime in the mid ‘80s.
Like it’s nothing,
he pulls the transparent plastic
from the cardboard,
freeing the diecast treasures,
and hands them to my son.
Watching the boy run the trucks
across the carpet,
I can’t help but think
she knew.