As I faint I remember my grandmother fainting onto the kitchen floor in Palo Alto. I brought a chair. I pulled her up and she sat as the queen of her own head’s country.

As I faint I remember nothing of this. Only when I awake did I know what nothing called out to her, her first name, my middle. Once in the Detroit basement together nobody fainting and she told me a story.

Although I couldn’t imagine her young suddenly deaf from a bomb falling near her summerhouse. The Black Sea caught slapping her beach of silence that held her when she fell in the kitchen.

The fall I hear when I fall outside for the first time falling nowhere near the catch of her arms.

Carol Ellis
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