A winter’s morning at the breakfast table, spiraling honey
into tea and embroidering reality. Softly, I step down ladder rungs—
from attic letters and back to drunken, earthen tongues. Hestia,
I receive you; let me surrender to the dream of your goodness.
If the world is to end in ruin, pour me a bitter, merciful brew. Give me
your robes of glory, your figs in baskets, your ichor, your amnesty.
Let me sacrifice crescents to baking and burning, musical
nights in the kitchen, caravans of jazz across the counter! If death is all
that is to come for us, let my stories be unstitched from fiction.
Uncover the missing ballet slippers, the living-room-tumbles, the inventions
of ramblers and time traveling fools, all the pocketed stones sinking into the sea.
Please, rid my house of its rivers of sharp honey and slow poison. My desires
are cloying, my actions venomous. See me for all that I desperately wish
to be. Abandon my lamps lit with whale oil, winter’s unraveling scarf still crimson
‘round my neck, the tides of my narrative steeping softly in prayer for so long,
I fear I’m bound to the bitterness of the gods. Hestia, render me
sober and domestic in the heart of your ever-patient harbor. Give me
your tall tales, your waiting games, your machinations of goodness.
Give me windchimes and stars colliding as I wait on the back porch of the
world for its violent, whistling end. From graceless lips, pour my thunderous
stories over earl grey. Stitch my fables of woe and tenderness into the
kitchen scenery as if escape isn’t only an unspoken art or an unrealized
dream. If I am permitted to tell the truth of my life, will you sit at my table
and listen? Let me knit a story with sturdier yarn. I’ll grant you the
sound of the soft pour of his whiskey, my sister’s socks rabbiting across the
hardwood to sit with me in the dark amid the throes of our mythic city in Tennessee
whose music I can’t remember for the life of me. Just the two of us, waiting by
the radio for news of our father’s surrender and counting his bottles to keep
track of time. On winter mornings, the Washington frost sticks to the outlines of
certain ghosts, so I watch his hazy January frame waltz into my kitchen and
pour another brew with his shaking, myth-making hands. I sip my earl grey
slowly, hands soldered to my grandmother’s blue willow Spode as if it could save me
from the mere idea of his eyes, his sightless storms invading the first city I feel
truly myself in. Amidst his visions of violence, let me hold fast to my verity
as a ship in Alexandria’s harbor, drawn in by its dying flames. Oh, Pharos, give me
a little more light, please. One day, in a faraway country, I’ll still be recounting
the nights we danced in our winter coats on that rooftop in January, all those
years ago. I’ll tell you about the coven of deer I witnessed in my dreams, and then
by the bay, watching sailboats disappear into the blue as winter’s ghosts melted
away over cups of tea, riotous slippers en pointe in the spring. Here, Hestia—
my morning mug, my harbor. Sweet harbinger of endings. Hands of sun. I sit in
an unreachable past that begs to be waylaid, and he is a lullaby in its walls.
Please—one last thread to stitch up the first true story I’ll ever tell. A latch
to close the attic. A rose to seal the tomb. Soon, I promise, I’ll reach the city of
my soul, sober and free of the stench of my father’s suffering. I’ll make it
back to New Orleans, and you’ll be so sick of my music, you can’t help but
ask: Are you not tired of all that jazz? In every fable, my mother is a doe in the kitchen;
my father, sometimes our stag and sometimes our hunter. Let me forever remain
an animal in my mother’s coven, perpetually setting her breakfast table. Let
the threads of my past surrender to my ties to this marvelous place where I take
ballet lessons on Sundays and always smell like seawater. Let this last, loyal
land remain unburdened from my suburban hauntings. I survive out of spite,
equipped by the fear that, come summer, this coastal city I’ve claimed as my own will
finally buck up and throw me from its unbuttoned coat like all the rest. Glorious
goddess of the hearth, if this house will burn either way, let me at least weave
straw into something gilded, if not thinly veiled. Hestia, I am aching for knitting needles
with the capacity to spin my dreams into reality and a kitchen table that can voyage
back two decades and convince everyone that ever left to stay. If I could do it all
over again, I’d always have time to dance with those who did. Please, winter steals more
spirits than any other season. Tell me you have time for tea and one last story.
Spencer Jewell (she/her) is currently pursuing an undergraduate degree in creative writing in Bellingham, Washington, where she works as the poetry editor for Jeopardy Magazine. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bluestem Magazine, Delta Poetry Review, and Jeopardy Magazine. She was a semi-finalist for the 2022 National Student Poets Program and received a National Silver Medal from Scholastic for her series of haikus. When she’s not writing, she’s usually baking up a storm, looking for lighthouses, hosting a tea party, or sitting by the sea.
Spencer’s poem “Camomile From Stormwater” was featured in Monsoon Season: Flood Memory.