“What's in the Bag?” by Sharon Kennedy-Nolle

What’s in the Bag?
for my son Patrick

I.
Poor relation on the porch, sad sack
squatter, heavy black Hefty,

sooty through the seasons, knotted tight,
keening on a stick bin, kindling wood.

Black squat Buddha shrugs.
It’s not going anywhere.

Could it be your bedding?
After they stripped your bed, this bag stuffed

with your body’s impress, that last tenderness
before you got up to go gone, to the headwaters to lie down?

II.
Across from my desk Wyeth’s watercolor hangs
Nick and Jaime, 1963: two burlap seed sacks, appleful fat

the clear hard work of two sons
at rest under spired limbs. 

I can’t make anything of mine.

III.
Slumped under what could have been
I can’t budge.

Lodestone, lodestone,
I can’t move,

mine, that knot,
can’t open, can’t.

Sharon Kennedy-Nolle

Sharon Kennedy-Nolle’s poetry has appeared or is upcoming in Bluestem, Chicago Quarterly Review, Cider Press Review, Juked, Lips Poetry Magazine, MacGuffin, Round, Midwest Quarterly, and Pennsylvania English, among others, while her dissertation was published as Writing Reconstruction: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the Postwar South (University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

Headshot: Frances F. Denny

Picture Credit: Staff