Poetry by Beth Kanell

Rob Leber CC



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Standard Transmission
 
You can’t drive far staring into the rearview mirror, can you? Hands
at ten o’clock and two; foot feathering the pedal below, as if you brush
someone else’s sock-warm toes under a table. You can’t see past
the next wide turn when you’re making it, only after you’ve swung
free, arm-over-arm exchange, and the steering wheel pushes back gently
while bright light snags your breath. With the right kind of map
balanced on the passenger seat there are hints ahead of time--
but time is only love spelled differently, the fricative released
and isn’t T a dental stop, all on its own? What you learn about death
makes more sense when set to music and when the lines
accept slant rhyme as what was meant to be, to be.
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​Unforgiven
 
I failed my sister when she was ten years old.
Winter came hard, sixty years later, snowflakes drifting,
uneven boundaries of garden beds vanishing. Mistakes
lose their edges. Not far from here, in the woods,
the remains of a nineteen-fifties truck continue their slow
rust and dissolution. Her legs cramped now from wheelchairs
her back always in spasm, she still imagines we could be
neighbors. Sisters like in the stories. Kissing each other’s
pink cheeks, giggling together about cute –
 
To my brother I confess, “Seven hundred miles between us
feels necessary.” She wants more of my heart. Devotion. Bonds
unshattered by harsh words. Last week she wrote a sweet poem
about my second husband, long dead now, a death that only
made me grateful—no longer afraid he’d call to threaten,
curse, announce another loaded gun, another horror. In her mind
this too can be erased, painted in watercolors across misleading
ink strokes. In a town near me, children chalked rainbows onto
summer sidewalks; long before winter, rain washed their hope
away. Dissolution. My sister says it would be
 
nice to live in that town, as she envisions us singing harmony.
The closest we’ve come, when one year we phoned weekly, she swore,
cussed me, repeated the F word, told me I was wrong and always wrong,
that only her version of reality mattered. It’s not a good idea
to drive while weeping. I pulled off, stared at the carcass of a doe
who’d raced the traffic and lost. Diminution. I am the only one
who remembers her tiny body in the pink cardboard box, arriving
home for the first time. She depends on me for reassurance
asks for another hundred dollars to pay for
 
power, electricity, light. I send it. I pray for her better health, knowing
so much depends on eating some kind of breakfast. Some days she is sure
eggs are dangerous; I don’t think she’s tried toast (buttered or not)
in decades, because gluten, because crop spray, because evil miasma
settled into her bones early and I admit it’s a relief when her anger
swerves away from my failure to adore her. Dedication. When the snow
gets deep enough, even an occasional thaw won’t melt it to ground
level. The ground itself is frozen two feet down and holds winter
in place beyond what the most ardent skiers desire. There is no altar
where sacrifice repairs the past. Those pink ribbons
 
she wanted should have decorated her, delighted her, adorned
clever braids in a coronet around her face, a crown, a halo. I failed her 
continue to fail her, unable to dramatize the tenderness she desires,
diminished by long distance and disease, though her memories
seem sharper than mine: perhaps because she nurtures the hurt
feelings, devotedly, determinedly, dominantly. When the disease
progresses and she stops forming text from talk, curls into pain,
becomes a caregiver’s assignment instead of the girl I knew, then
my winter will bite with bitter wind. This drama, this diminution
this refusal to forgive childhood:
 
I open her messages, add pink hearts, tell her she’s amazing.
And she is. But I failed her when she was ten years old. Devoted
as she is to preserving this resentment, she remains my little sister,
my long-ago song that I failed to sing the way she wanted to hear it.
 
 


Beth Kanell lives in northeastern Vermont among rivers, rocks, and a lot of writers. Her poems seek comfortable seats in small well-lit places, including Lilith Magazine, The Comstock Review, Indianapolis Review, Gyroscope Review, The Post-Grad Journal, Does It Have Pockets?, Anti-Heroin Chic, Ritualwell, Persimmon Tree, Northwind Treasury, RockPaperPoem, Ginosko, and Rise Up Review. Her collection Thresholds is due in 2026 from Kelsay Books.



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