All This Distance, and So Little to Show for It

I am thirty-eight and do not know my grandmother’s

middle name. Once, I texted my sister to ask

the kind of cancer that pared her away to nothing

as I assembled cell by cell beneath my mother’s navel.

I cannot now recall it. Nor can I recall the journey

we made from Pittsburgh to Mexico, chasing a cure

that would not materialize. Sick with mornings and grief’s

precursor, did my mother berate the gas pedal?

Did my grandmother startle, the Ukrainian still soft

and small in her throat? Womb-blind, I possessed as much

of her then as I do these four decades later: my own

middle name, shared with six in my first-grade class.

I am thirty-eight and do not know if memory is a way

of holding on or letting go. Even now my mother

cannot say her own mother’s name without crying.

Ashley Kunsa’s recent poetry appears/is forthcoming in Massachusetts Review, Bennington Review, Radar Poetry, Malahat Review, and other journals. Originally from Pittsburgh, she is assistant professor of creative writing at Rocky Mountain College in Billings, MT, where she lives with her family. Find her online at www.ashleykunsa.com.