The Mattress
In the middle of my grandmother’s double bed,
a long high lump in the mattress
rose between two furrows,
one made by her and one by Harry,
who’d died long before I was born.
Harry wasn’t my grandfather,
but so long as he lived, he was in that bed
protecting my grandmother at night
in her big old house, so big that winters after he died,
she couldn’t afford to heat it.
She turned off all the radiators
except in the kitchen and her bedroom,
where I think she must have trembled at night,
despite the twin furrow beside her
or perhaps because of it.
There was, of course, the gun.
I’m not sure how I found it under the mattress
the year I was nine, but I always knew it was there.
Alone sometimes in that room,
I would slide my hand under the mattress,
hold the gun and wonder if my grandmother
would ever pull the trigger against another person,
even one who might’ve entered her house at night
wandering freely downstairs in the cold,
looking for something to keep, something that belonged
to an old widow who had a revolver upstairs
under her warm and double lonely mattress.
© Anne Harding Woodworth
Anne Harding Woodworth is the author of eight books of poetry and four chapbooks. Her most recent book is Gender: Two Novellas in Verse. Her seventh book, Trouble, received the 2022 William Meredith Award for Poetry. She is a fervent gun-control advocate, and an excerpt from her chapbook, The Last Gun, received the COG Poetry Award, judged by A. Van Jordan, and was subsequently animated (see https://vimeo.com/193842252). For more information, see Anne’s website at www.annehardingwoodworth.com.
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