Joann Deiudicibus
Duplex
My mother’s apartment in the town where I grew up burned in 2014, another Victorian home grandfathered in without inspection. The old brick building’s attic already breathed must and smoke, filled with singed relics: a wooden trunk, antique jars and bottles, odd clippings and ends. The adjoining attorney’s office was wall-stacked with jaundiced newspapers, gold-trimmed books, yellow legal pads and Post-its. Mechanical failure (crossed wires) or act of nature (a gnawing squirrel)? Cause and origin unknown.
When I got the call, I thought maybe she’d fallen asleep smoking in bed, or that one of her Yankee candles or incense sticks got knocked over by the cats. But my mother was at work managing the small drug store that’s since gone out of business. Our side of the building, still intact, suffered mostly smoke damage. Water cracked and peeled the pink walls of the bedroom we once shared. Photos in fractured glass frames fell with ash from shattered windows onto small patches of grass and concrete. Gutted. My mother would have to move. A fireman saved one cat, but the other’s body was never found. A friend picked me up. My mind wandered, eye fixed on childhood marks—the only way home.
bomb peonies flashing through the graveyard gate a deer corpse opens
About the Author
Joann Deiudicibus teaches writing in New York’s Hudson Valley. Her poems and articles appear in Comstock Review, Drifting Sands, Typishly, Stone Poetry Quarterly, The Shawangunk Review, Chronogram, Affective Disorder and the Writing Life (Palgrave Macmillan), and three Hudson Valley anthologies—WaterWrites, A Slant of Light, and Reflecting Pool published by Codhill Press. Ask her about true crime, cats, and confessionalism.