Red River Review
Established 1999
Everything is Lost by Ken Wheatcroft-Pardue
Me, the dumbest sentimentalist of all times.
Today I’ve been thinking on that run-down apartment
house my grandma lived in near downtown decades ago.
Been razed for years, but today
that musty smell in the hallway came back to me.
Is there even one other who remembers that?
And the dents my grandma put in the ceiling
with her broom when the Mexicans upstairs
made the walls shake with their conjunto.
Today I’m even weepy about her white Dr. Scholl’s,
her True Detective magazines scattered near her bed,
watching Divorce Court on a TV with rabbit ears akimbo.
My sisters and I’d eat on a fold-out
card table in the living room: fried chicken,
butter beans, cornbread in a cold glass of milk.
In the back, an alternative universe
of peeling paint, glass-strewn alleys,
old men parked on their back stoops, curling Colt 45s.
Everything is of a time,
and in time,
everything is lost.
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