an old man
sits by the bedroom window

his grandmother’s clock competes
with the rumbling furnace
the refrigerator hum
the crack of his knees

each evening, the phone on the nightstand
brings his daughter’s voice all the way from Cleveland
like the knock on the door

and now the day his granddaughter was born
his mother sifting flour into the yellow bowl
how his wife wears her hair in heaven

(Published in Dappled Things, Volume 11, Issue 2)