door to door
By Emilee Wirshing
Photo by Heather Lang-Cassera.
you may have noticed something missing,
an inventory of your guest rooms will tell you
someone kept a souvenir
and while your kind,
no-questions-asked policy
of covering the shipping
on the bronze stamped diamond tags
is often an invitation to return them…
my grandfather had no intention
of giving back your keys;
and why would he?
He couldn’t reimburse the time spent
in your unfamiliar sheets.
I never met my father’s father,
but I can picture him dapper
in a secondhand gray flannel suit
peddling the latest greatest whatever
to anyone wise enough to spot a steal.
A man with seven sons, on the road,
wandering the west for a better life.
When he would come home
to his tired bride, he would give her
a brass talisman,
which she saved in a box
because my grandmother kept everything
and eventually they made their way to me.
I too have no intention of dropping them off
in the nearest mail slot,
mainly because most of your
hotels and motels have closed.
And isn’t it something to have kept them,
in the family and out of landfill,
however inconvenient that may have seemed
for you at the time. Please accept this apology
from one descendant of a man who can support
his family from the highway,
without debt or a side hustle,
just the perfect excuse to leave when
the boys get rowdy and the babies are wailing.
I’m off, he would say and his wife would kiss
him farewell, waving a handkerchief from
the front porch before heading to the
garden to shoot gophers. She raised
the doctor, the gambler, the CEO,
and he chased the setting sun
down the coastline, night after night,
missing his darling…not missing his darling…
that I never knew, but upon returning
he always gave her the key to his heart.
Emilee Wirshing is a librarian and lifelong Nevadan. Her chapbook, american dream houses was published by Tolsun Books in March of 2020; her typewriter poetry can be found @lavendertypweriter.
Photo courtesy of Emilee Wirshing.