Poem of the Month

Poem

Letter to My Sister

by Elizabeth Bachinsky

Remember that Sunday morning In February?
We went to the Labour Temple in Regina
to watch our cousin Jenny practice
with the Poltava dancers. The family had
buried our grandmother’s ashes the day before
beside our grandfather’s grave in a graveyard
just outside the city. It was bitter cold.
It was snowing. Everyone wore long black coats.
Our mother and aunts and uncle lowered
Grandma’s urn into a hole in permafrost
so hard the gravedigger must have had to drill it
with an auger. The next day, we watched
Jenny dance. I remembered Jenny from
years ago at our cousin’s wedding outside
Medicine Hat; that same wedding where Mom
had a low blood sugar late at night and almost
died because we couldn’t find any juice or
Life Savers in the hotel room. We’d danced
all night in our polka dot dresses, begged
Jenny to spin in the middle of the dance floor
all ba-donk-a-donk-donk and junk-in-the-trunk,
but she refused and refused until, finally, she gave
up and spun like a revved-up ballerina.
It was pretty cool, years later, to see her dancing
at the hall with the whole troupe. They were super
young, weren’t they? Warming up, the girls
seemed like ballet dancers in their legwarmers
and leggings and the boys were lean and tall
and wore soccer jerseys. Man, those boys could jump.
They’d swagger from one end of the hall
to the other and mimic dance moves they’d studied
on a video sent from Ukraine. They were stars.
And the girls; you could tell those girls loved them.
No wonder Jenny didn’t want to take centre stage
at that wedding. That job’s for men. But she could
spin and spin and spin and spin. Across town,
Granny’s ashes lay newly marked by a numbered
flag flying from a four-foot pole in case
we should need to find her in the snow. Jenny told us
she’d found our mother’s red boots in the attic
at the hall. Her name Cathy Gnius marked on the soles
in black marker. I mean, I know we know the story
of how our parents met, but didn’t you think
it felt like proof, knowing those boots were there?