"Buckets of Ashes" by Ann Neuser Lederer

Buckets of Ashes

The past is a bucket of ashes.
~ Carl Sandburg

It smells just like voodoo, I thought, when I found it, unwittingly,
under our bed.

It apparently had been there for weeks, on his side,
her face, smiling up.

A sickness on the breath of someone you know well.

A clotted placenta, buried, under the porch at dusk.

A walnut, moldering, dug by a squirrel, in the clay
of a potted geranium, in fall.

Hair spray in heat, clash of deodorants from exercise class,
into the steam of the pool.

Mud under fingernails.
Coins in the coffin.

A hair, strategically woven, into the hem
of your favorite winter coat.

Dogs, we dig in the dirt, greedily sniffing armpits,
the same two sets of sheets, now thin as handkerchiefs.

Her perky face at twenty through the springs,
my bottom sheet, a veil.

I knew it was only a picture, a thirty-year-old antique,
glossy in black and white.

I told myself to not feel it staring.

Yet, even now, after a storm, knucklebones sometimes surface
in the murky shallow ponds.

The past, that overgrown root ball,
needs trimming,
needs taming.

Ann Neuser Lederer

Ann Neuser Lederer's poetry and nonfiction are published in journals such as Diagram, Passages North, Brevity, and UCity Review, whose "noteworthy" section presents ten of her poems. Her work is also honored in Best of the Net and Ohio State University's Vandewater Poetry Award; published in anthologies such as A Call to Nursing and The Country Doctor Revisited; and in her chapbooks Approaching Freeze (2003), The Undifferentiated (2003), Weaning the Babies (2007), and Fly Away Home (2019). Ann was born in Ohio and has worked there and surrounding states as a Registered Nurse. Additional information and links are available at http://ann-neuser-lederer.blogspot.com/

Headshot: Al Lederer

Photo Credit: Staff