I curl up with my aunt. Her husband broke her arm. We watch him storming from our retreat.

The sweet peas blossom on the fence. I carry a pail of water, the handle swivels and water splashes on my feet, but there’s enough. My aunt holds her arm up. It has healed like new. She is assuring me we heal. What one can do, so can another. Working in the garden is how we restore loss.

My aunt has something to tell me about my mother. She is shaking her head back and forth as picks potato bugs off the plants, squashing them with her thumbnail. A stream runs in back of the garden, mingling sewage from an outhouse and motor oil from a neighbor’s dying car.

I hold onto a fence rail. As the older sister, she was responsible for my mother. When my mother went sleepwalking, she had to pull back from the road and guide her back to the house. She had to do her chores when my mother languished – no one languished – sturdiness or nothing. So she went, my mother, to get milk from the icehouse, so her mother could make butter. And how children get waylaid, how they wander.

Samn Stockwell has published extensively. Her new book Musical Figures is published by Thirty West Publishing House. Previous books won the National Poetry Series and the Editor’s Prize at Elixir. Recent poems are in Pleiades and others.