A Sort-Of Happy Holiday
by Jennifer Phillips

Opening a fifth in place of presents
to an old movie from an era of snow and repentance,
and fedoraed men with turned up collars heading home,

lamps always lit among the bookcases,
and star-eyed scrubbed kids in poinsettiaed dresses.
This is not then. All the places

you might walk upstairs to, stay awhile
and pay for at a battered desk, are not your own.
But Mary at the market, with a sort-of-smile

slid a pair of day-old muffins into your sack,
muttered Happy Holidays! and your codger-twin
held the door for you into the sleet and hack

of barking traffic balking at lights in haste
to get wherever they wanted most to be,
while you doddered off at a more patient pace.

The Holy Family in a plaster huddle,
wind-chipped, decorates the local square,
bedraggled without benefit of stable.

You say you are grateful for a roof and a door that locks,
and a kind look across a checkout counter.
These days, mercy-crumbs are all it takes

to get through, and none of them comes with wrap
or ribbons. It’s free night, New Year’s Eve on the subway
and a seat spare near the door. A wisp of scent maps

a route to memory. Even if it was
a hard-handed loud family to come up in, it was yours,
and she smelled of Toni Home Perm, and he of chaws

of Tiger Chew, and meatloaf waited most Mondays
on a set table, and everyone seemed to be scraping a way
up to a known destination, not sliding slantwise

toward avalanche, or flying a holding-pattern
waiting to spiral down. Still, there are ferns
of fractal frost ornamenting the window, a smatter

of reflected red and green in the ice,
and the radiator’s cranking out its old hymn of comfort,
so, for today, the journey feels worth the price.

Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 26, Issue 5.

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