Take up your tricorn hat
and sweep the ghastly corners
of your waistcoat from my kitchen,
great-great-and-so-on-grandfather.

Take the soggy reins dangling
from your veiny hands
away from Sunday breakfast.
I do not need you to split
this egg on the pan’s edge
or slice this banana into circles.

Stop telling me the story
of how you died–headfirst
off your horse into a fence, splinters
and brambles crowning your corpse.
You were heroically old,
Tiresias in the saddle, going blind
on your proud gelding.

Stop with your tantrums.
No more tossing my keys onto the floor
in a pale fit of pique. Every time I retrieve
my driver’s license, I feel the urge
to check my temples for gray.

Audrey Hall is a recent graduate from the University of Florida’s MFA program and is earning her MA in English at the University of Alabama. She is a 2021 recipient of a scholarship from the NYS Summer Writers Institute and reads for Black Warrior Review and Five South. Her poems appear in Crab Creek Review, Saw Palm, Hunger Mountain, and Alaska Quarterly Review, among others.