Greatest Generation by Ed Granger

                        Alexander Rabb CC



Greatest Generation

In the movies, it’s a gray sedan pluming
dust as it races toward a farmyard
strewn with chickens, an alleyway clogged 
by scrawny kids playing ball. It’s wind 
combing a tawny field in Kansas, a rapt 
stand of Oregon timber already measuring 
its fall. Always it’s a mother framed forever 
before. Then after, as the terror she’s
shoved hard into the cold sink of her 
gut rises like set-aside dough or midnight 
bile. The mother’s never yours, although
you suppose she could be with a deft 
twist of the way she shifts her weight onto 
one hip, tucks a wisp of who she would be
in some other life behind one ear. You have
one chance left before the credits roll 
to become next-greatest twice removed 
from Omaha Beach, a fetid South Pacific 
airstrip. To not slam through the screen 
porch, not kiss her on the cheek, not display 
yesterday’s wounds. She’s been frozen
for you here in a Glenn Miller haze
of glinting saxophones, their bells swaying
in unison to “In the Mood.” Notice how
her knuckles pool around the hinges
she once held you with. The way she brushes
damp hands across her apron front 
before willing her knees to the door. You have 
one chance not to knock, to keep this mother 
not yours breathing in her retirement place
already stocking body bags. To make sure 
her grandkids don’t have to say goodbye 
on Skype. See how her chest rises and falls
to fill this dream at 4 a.m.. Tell her 
you love this mother who’s not yours 
while the gray sedan not yours still idles. 
Then stay home.

​

Ed Granger’s chapbook “Voices from the First Gilded Age” was published in 2019 by Finishing Line Press. His poems have also appeared or are forthcoming in THINK Journal, Potomac Review, Little Patuxent Review, Naugatuck River Review, Rappahannock Review, and other journals.

---