Stella

In that store
twilight reigned.

Brick corner building
caged windows
caged-doors
scissored-open
in the daytime.
Buzzer locked door
for foiling robbers
and shoplifters.

Her wide yellow
face
framed by short
black
curly hair.
There was an energy of
menace in her
that nobody except
me
seemed to notice.

If left in her
care  I was
assured confusion as
I was introduced
to a world and
reality
so counter my own
that I could feel it
as this time-stopping
malaise and anger
overlayed with yellow
sunlight.

Yin-Yang two-face
smiling slash scowling.
This clearly evil
yellow woman
married to a simple
black-faced
man.
Running this prison
of a ghetto
store.

Comics in packs of
three, wrapped
in plastic
mastheads torn off.
Even as a kid
when you read them
they felt dirty.
You felt dirty
and wrong
like scoring with a
homely girl with
zero personality
felt
ten years later.

Sour, curdled
Yoo-Hoos in the
cooler.
Expired lunchmeat
ready to expire chips
bread
everything perishable
really.
It was like she
was teaching a
Master-class on
the cheapness
of life.

This yellow-faced
vampire
living on Nigger-
blood
was family
and somehow
respected.
Despite all the stolen
TV's
radios
bicycles
in the store's
back room
she was respected.

Old TV's
radios
appliances
that were obviously
the belongings
of some
very poor
people.
And I'd like to think
that she was
a secret
angel
taking old coffee-makers
and turning them
into food
but
those curdled Yoo-Hoos
and illegal
comics... no...
If she was trading
food, she was
trading it for
blood.

She always looked down
her nose at
me and my
mother
as though we were
suspect or
less than.
My mother the poor
country girl
from a criminal family
who married into
THE family.

The blessed family
locking arms against
outsiders like
perverse royalty.

The insanity that was
her existence
 filled me
as a child
with dread.
As a young man
a sense of perverse
spectacle.

In the end I thought
of her
not at all.

except...
She wouldn't die.


she held on for
years, "living" in a
nursing home
in a semi-vegetative
state.
Ambulatory but
empty.
A zombie living
on pudding and
the life force
that my grandmother spent
during her frequent
visits.

But in the end
there was
an end.

And with it, all
those kind empty
platitudes
about Miss Estelle,
Sister Martin, or
just plain "Stella", went
into the frigid earth.

As was her character
when she
decided to
go
she went during
a brutal
Chicago
February
ice-storm.