Americana Stories – Poetry

Form of Collection, by Catharine Batsios

Before I pay cash only
for my royal blue driving gloves,
some soldier named Harry’s Zippo
from 1943, and that glass ashtray
large enough to be a gravy boat,
I look at buttons in jars—
lidless jars at Eastern Market, buttons
light in my hands, cupping fingers like
pistachio shells, giving me
one last chance
to take them home. They’ve accumulated there,

They are shaped like the ones from inside great-grandma’s hall
closet, the buttons in the sugar tin next to the pens with licked nubs,

They are shaped like a honeycomb in the center
where I’ve stored things like great-grandma’s brooches
from the Hudson’s catalogue with missing gems,
her back bedroom with the sewing machine
where she taught me to take three steps and twirl,
where my foot slipped, and bobbin’s thread went through fabric 
into my ring finger.

They are shaped out of bone
with glass in the middle like my mother
at the kitchen table in her bathrobe,
head in hands after the first time
she slapped me for telling her no.

I take out the mother
of pearl and set them aside.
I take out the brass ones sealed with foreign alphabet;
they smell like sweat and onions from my father,
and perfume from my shampoo
when I hid them under my pillow to translate them.

I take out the red ones that hit the light like tiger’s eye
and move them under my tongue and bite down,
drawing blood to hide them
for later—

in my room by light siphoned through blinds, one by one
I take them out—the blood eye and the tiger’s eye—
fasten them to the front of my coat for safe keeping.

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