Steps to Home by Jennifer Jackson Berry
I.
At every 5 a.m. market opening:
someone searching for the perfect fruit.
Others finger cabbage leaves
before shred
into slaw
or prepped for kraut,
read vegetable skins like braille.
II.
The men all worked in the mill,
slept shifts in one house,
dropped laundry communally like coins
at church offering.
My grandfather stole
the whitest undershirts, locked them
in his single bureau drawer.
The key was drab brass, like his brother’s
gray shirts, dull
as each building’s façade.
III.
Even the smallest boy
at the baseball field
with the most crabgrass
wants to count the steps to home.
Jennifer Jackson Berry is the author of the chapbooks When I Was a Girl (Sundress Publications) and Nothing But Candy (Liquid Paper Press). Recent poems have appeared in Harpur Palate, Green Mountains Review, Connotation Press, Amethyst Arsenic, and Stone Highway Review, among others. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
I.
At every 5 a.m. market opening:
someone searching for the perfect fruit.
Others finger cabbage leaves
before shred
into slaw
or prepped for kraut,
read vegetable skins like braille.
II.
The men all worked in the mill,
slept shifts in one house,
dropped laundry communally like coins
at church offering.
My grandfather stole
the whitest undershirts, locked them
in his single bureau drawer.
The key was drab brass, like his brother’s
gray shirts, dull
as each building’s façade.
III.
Even the smallest boy
at the baseball field
with the most crabgrass
wants to count the steps to home.
Jennifer Jackson Berry is the author of the chapbooks When I Was a Girl (Sundress Publications) and Nothing But Candy (Liquid Paper Press). Recent poems have appeared in Harpur Palate, Green Mountains Review, Connotation Press, Amethyst Arsenic, and Stone Highway Review, among others. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.