Grandma and the Football Team
Grandma didn’t always
hang with a football team,
sometimes she played hockey or
ice-skated with Chinese waiters.
It was rumored she went
skating on a date
twenty years after her
husband died.
She was a tall, peculiar
bride to Louis
who strolled near
Orthodox Jews
who came to her house
to perform miracles.
Ida lived with Mrs. Grossman,
who wore makeup over skin cancer.
Ida worried if Julia, Mrs. Grossman,
stole her cottage cheese.
Grandma—pale, thin and hunch-backed at 80—
was no Leon Trotsky,
nor was she Michelangelo’s David;
and never wore pants.
In all her years,
“I will never wear pants,”
didn’t stick her hand
in the daughter’s closet, hoping
for polyester inspiration to
enter the 20th Century.
One weekend,
while her children went to England,
her children’s children, that is,
the burnout Jimmy Hendrix fans
who did acid and smoked pot,
drank a few beers and made
fun of the queers,
the incarnates of New Jersey,
sophisticated and aesthetic culture,
decided to have a party.
But they did not
invite Grandma,
they locked her with
a hook in the lock
Ida in her nighties
while the boys in the band
and the girls in the boys
went rollicking through the
kitchen where Ida,
twenty minutes before,
ate gefilte fish.
She took off her stockings,
letting the long toes rip,
when in came Lakewood, New Jersey’s finest
like a herd of erect penises
to celebrate with a woman whose heart valves
were rustier than old bicycles.
Bras snapped
the dog Shrimpy got high
goyisha weight lifters
made love to Brooklyn Zionists.
The skinny woman
with a full head of grey hair
and bumps on her head
in her flowered nightgown,
where you could see her
flabby breasts bouncing,
yelled, “Eleanor! What’s going on?
Eleanor—I have a heart condition!”
“We’re having a party Grandma,
would you like to join?”
“Vey’s mir!” she whined, screaming in Yiddish
to the Polish, Irish and German quarterbacks.
Smoking a joint, one went up to Ida,
“Would you like a hit?”
Ida’s grandson, in a veil of pot,
led her to bed,
where she snuggled under a
pink comforter
while the pot shone through
like a vapor against the window.
