Author: Dannye Romine Powell

Cited by

• Sarah Dessen (1)
  • IN: That Summer (1996) Fiction, Young Adult Fiction, Contemporary Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: This one sits all morning beside the picture window, staring out at the lawn in which these situations is always under a sheet of ice, even in June. The girl is wearing her quilted robe, gloves, fur-lined slippers. Still she can't get warm. Her mother gets hot just watching her, so she goes out for groceries, makes a great show when she returns of rattling the brown paper bags she saves to line the bird cage. Now she is running water, peeling melons, humming, arranging daisies. We who are watching want the mother to quit making noise, to stop chopping fruit, to leave the kitchen. We want her to walk down the hall to the closet where the wool blankets are stored. We want her to gather five or six, the solids, the stripes, the MacGregor plaids and tuck them under her daughter's legs, saving one for her feet and one for her thin shoulders. Now we want her to heat water for tea, bring in wood and quick before her daughter freezes seal all the windows against the stray, chill peal of bells
    FROM: At Every Wedding Someone Stays Home, (1994), Poem, US