Poetry by Emily Ransdell
My Inheritance
I’d forgotten how often it rains
in Ohio, back for the first time
in years. I stood in a neighbor’s
kindly-offered slicker as the auction
commenced. Sold, the glass-doored
cupboard with its scent of holiday
candles, that fake cinnamon and pine.
Sold, the maplewood table. Slatted bed.
My white confirmation dress.
The house was a box of fossils,
our belongings the teeth
and bones of the past. I’m no
fan of keepsakes. I have no use
for photos of unknown ancestors
or my doe-eyed mother before
I was born. I could feel
the neighbors watching so I set aside
a cast-iron skillet and a couple
of stainless mixing bowls.
Rain kept falling over everything.
Even the good stuff
was going for next to nothing.
I didn’t know what else to take.
In the Rain Shadow
Things grow so fast here—the cypress hedge
our neighbors complain is oppressive,
the rhodies that darken our north-facing den.
Firs so tall now we can barely see
the mountain, even from our daughter’s
old room upstairs.
Where I grew up, trees were mostly deciduous.
Once the maples flamed out, the place felt
full of skeletons, dark-limbed and silent,
holding their tongues. Last fall I went back
to a school reunion after thirty years away.
The student center so much smaller now,
my apartment on 10th Street
in need of paint.
I can count all the houses I’ve lived in
on one hand. Sometimes at night,
I revisit them, circling like an animal
for a place to sleep. That room
with the communal kitchen in Bloomington,
the duplex in Missoula where I hung
homemade curtains with clip-on rings.
Everywhere I lived was who I thought I was.
I’ve lived here longer
than anywhere. Coyotes at night,
occasional owl. Today a lone strand
of spider silk glints in the sun.
None of my old loves
would know me now.
Emily Ransdell lives and teaches in the Pacific Northwest. Her work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Poet Lore, Tar River Poetry, Terrain, River Styx, Calyx, and elsewhere. She has been a finalist for the Rattle Poetry Prize and the New Millennium Writings Award, and was twice the runner-up for the New Letters Poetry Prize. Emily has received multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations Her debut poetry collection, One Finch Singing, was awarded the Lewis Prize by Concrete Wolf Press and was published in 2023.
Arcturus 