My grandfather wakes up late.
He doesn’t make coffee. He has stopped
reading the newspaper.

His wife says he is talking less.
This could be a good thing, she laughs,
if not for the circumstances. I wonder

what it is like in there, in his mind,
the bathtub that is slowly draining,
the photograph developing in reverse.

He has always been a storyteller.
At family dinners, the end of the table
becomes his pulpit and we know

every sermon by heart: the smell
of the outhouse from his childhood.
The growling sound of the

airplane engines. The exact shade of leather
the sun burned my grandmother’s skin
the summer they eloped.

He wrote an autobiography once,
which was read cover to cover by
only a handful of our family

because even in prose, he is longwinded.
I wonder what it feels like, now,
to have all of those words

floating around. His tongue,
an empty mason jar. The fireflies
just out of reach.

- Sierra DeMulder