I cut rectangles and squares
from the shirts he left
behind, the cotton oxfords
worn when playing
with that gospel group, the name
which escapes me now and no one
seems to remember. I should have sold
his Phish t-shirts on eBay, but instead
have traced patterns around the logos, ovals
and stars to applique, reconstructing
the pieces, rainbow colors
and words against the staid
blue and white cotton. I keep adding
rows, rectangles from the linen dress shirt
worn to our sister Bri’s wedding, the one
he’s wearing in the last picture
where our family is all together.
Arms rest across each other’s
shoulders, a crazy quilt line
of heights and smiles, burgundies
and pastels, joined together
by an invisible whipstitch
of longing.
There is an art to stacking wood, each row
balanced on the one below, making sure
the knot in one doesn’t wobble the small
branch on another. We work in silence,
my son in the trailer full of cut logs
from a maple tree felled in December’s
ice storm. He hands them to me so I can
hand them to my father who waits in the
covered shed he built to house them. One on
top of the other. Waiting for winter.
on the banjo head, evidence of years spent picking "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" and
"I’ll Fly Away," his fingers an extension of his soul, the maple neck laid across his body
as if he could pick it up and play. But like the sun that creeps up over the Kentucky mountains,
blinding as it crests, drug overdose deaths have risen. Between 1999 and 2019 deaths
due to heroin rose from 0.07 percent per 100,000 to 4.9 percent. In 2008, drug overdoses
killed 36,500. That year the population of my hometown of Ashland, Kentucky was 21,332.
Brent loved that banjo. It was the one thing he pawned for drug money that he would always
go back and get.
Lucretia Voigt was born and raised in Ashland, Kentucky. A graduate of Eckerd College, she is currently enrolled in the Masters Program in Creative Writing at Queens University of Charlotte. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Women Speak, Sheila-Na-Gig, The Wise Owl, and Thimble Literary Magazine.