Ordinary Things-Lewes, 1942

Ordinary Things- Lewes, 1942

by Liz Dolan

He taps the brim of his fisherman’s cap
and hands the carpenter two crisp twenties,

a ten and a five for the white pine box.
I will carry it myself, he says.

And he does, to the bedroom where
the boy dressed in his cotton suit

lies on mother’s crocheted bedspread.
He places the body in the satin-lining

like he was laying out Sunday clothes,
sets a tiny prayer book in his broken fingers.

He tucks a cat’s eye marble, a
red-hot into his boy’s vest pocket.

A red-winged blackbird hops on the sill.


-refers to the word casket from the short fiction piece Madeline in Her Coffin by Gay Degani

-editor Rose Hunter of the YB Journal challenges that Lindsay Marianne Walker’s poem The Josephine Game could refer from Liz’s poem. Do you see the connections?