Joshua Michael Stewat
Pennies from Heaven
For my stepmother, Cyndi
It’s too soon for an elegy as we dance out of step to Louis Prima belting, “Pennies from Heaven,” despite Parkinson’s curling her body in on itself like a dead bird’s feet. My father, reclining in his recliner after I brought him home from his monthly procedure (a doctor jabs a needle in his eye to keep him from going blind), pokes a slipper out from under the blue blanket pulled up to his chin stubble, and rocks his heel to the swinging boogie beat. I no longer wish to write about my dead brother—not another poem for my mother gone five years. And by mentioning what I don’t want to mention, here I am, mentioning it. So, no elegy for her, who’s more of a mother to me than my mother. No elegy for her eighty-nine pounds and dwindling. No elegy while Prima trades skat phrases with a jump-jive tenor sax—not as long as her hand pirouettes in mine as she twirl-shuffles, avoiding the coffee table. We are gifted this, if not good, then at least, better day—a day not spent hunched over, exhausted from exhaustion; a day we open wide our pockets, gathering whatever grace that rains.
lowering the needle
onto the record
over and over
singing along to memory’s
pops and hisses
About the Author
Joshua Michael Stewart‘s books include Break Every String, The Bastard Children of Dharma Bums, and Love Something. His work has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Rattle, and Best Small Fiction 2025. His latest book is Welcome Home, Russell Edson, a graphic novel and prose poem hybrid created with illustrators Bret M. Herholz and Aaron J. Krolikowski. https://joshuamichaelstewartauthor.com