Granma on a Mountain

Eccentric Granma, cooped up
after decades on a mountain side,
because desert winds take your mind
and her family gave her a TV to draw into
as moths to that blue glowing
zapper. Her husband, found
in a plastic bag inside a box at the
back of the bottom shelf, corner
of her garage. He moved to
a terracotta pot where Granma used to
sit at sunrise and sundown. She liked it there
because these events occurred on her left and right
shoulders, respectively, as she looked
across the valley to where the coyotes
howled each night. Her fingers,
like bark, massaged the textures of
rolling acrylic paintings that lined her walls,
mountain-scapes and children hiding
in tree trunks that she painted, or her friends.
Ghosts hid her belongings. Otherwise, she'd have
flushed them to the septic tank, not
emptied in twelve years and she
couldn't understand the smells permeating
from those backed pipes.
She sipped Jim Beam with her neighbor, whose
arms hugged around her five foot, frail
frame twice, but with caution. She
loved to see those coming arrive, and loved to see
them go. She loved the loneliness in her
thoughts that taught her, properly enough, that
the weather is a lady in a frying pan and
three people in her bathtub was precisely
how she felt that day.
Granma, out there in the mountain desert,
wearing her sunhat, told Billy Mack just how
things truly were and that someone's been hiding
her things; her suspicions relieved when
she gave everything away to her friends and had
nothing else to worry about. Her family,
very shortly thereafter, sent her to the half-way house.