My grandmother’s funeral is a mason jar.
It’s old, stained, clouded, cracked near the lip because
it was left out on the porch all winter
and the cold snaps shocked the glass. Though,
It might have been from the way my aunt dropped it.
That’s how it got out on that porch in the first place.
On a gray, indifferent afternoon it had slipped from reddened fingers
and landed on my mother’s toes
and she and my aunt stood over it, bleeding together.
They forgot to pick it up when they came back inside.
That’s how I found it, small and fat-handed,
and because I didn’t understand
I stuffed it with rocks and dirt
to make a home for the worms I tried to keep
from drying out on the driveway when it rained.
Old blood dries black, and it looks a whole lot like earth,
so I couldn’t have known my contribution was out of place.
My mother scolded me and emptied the worms in the garden,
setting the jar back where it had been,
standing guard beside the door.
I made a game of hopping over it when I came home.
One night it storms, hails, and my mother brings it inside,
spilling red, revived by raging water, over the dining table
and I help her clean it up as best I can.
Sometimes, she says, evil people make young people,
and they use kind people to do it.
It’s the worst story in the world,
and it is told again, and again, and again, and
it dries cold on my short-fingered, uncalloused, baby-fat-hands.
I am the one to take the jar outside in the morning,
and in the thin, fledgeling light,
blood is blood once more and
the crack cuts my finger,
running what’s mine through its own clear veins.
It’s a hungry thing, and my mother keeps it fed,
spilling whatever she can into it,
adding her blood to mine, and hers, and hers, and hers,
all of us smudged around the rim.
On the night I come home to find her leaning over it,
trying to claw her heart out and shove it
through the wide canning-friendly mouth,
I want to scream.
“Leave it empty,” I beg as I pull her inside,
“Leave it empty just this once.”
I smooth over the plough-lines she’d carved in her chest
and lay her down to sleep.
In the dim light weeping through the windows of the house
the jar gleams like something precious,
a dishonest ruby-red.
My still-fat, too-young, un-calloused hands shake
as I raise it over my head and
shatter it on the driveway.
Kneeling, I gather the shards,
determined to leave no trace of this violence.
I’m cut to ribbons and I stain the pavement
with what, I will tell my daughter, is rust.
When I meet her it will be with thin hands,
worn, but soft, because I will work
lotion into my palms each night
to keep her from feeling the scars.
