Poem in Which I Acknowledge I Am Vintage by Denise Duhamel

my sister and I drank glasses of milk listening to all the French

Poem in Which I Acknowledge I Am Vintage

by Denise Duhamel

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Every New Year’s Day,
my sister and I were mesmerized
by the black and white cat clock
with a tail that swished back and forth
in rhythm with its eyes that followed.
When the tail went left, so did the cat’s pupils.
When the tail went right—well, you get the idea.
The metronomic tail didn’t seem to sync
with any second or minute or anything else
happening on the face of the clock
which actually sat in the cat’s belly. The cat
wore a bowtie and his whiskers
were more of a moustache. My father
and the uncles got drunk as they played pitch
as my sister and I drank glasses
of milk listening to all the French.
My mother forbade my father
to teach us, as French speakers
back then, in the mill town where I grew up,
were called “Canucks” and were assigned
traits always given to immigrants. My mother
and the aunts gossiped, pulling pork pies
from the oven, followed by ceramic pots
full of baked beans made with molasses
and chunks of salt pork. The cat, neither
English or French, kept time in silence, not even
a meow. My sister and I kept each other
company, trying to guess a French word here
or there. A blue, swirly carnival glass hen
decorated Aunt Aura’s end table. Under
the iridescent lid was a mound of red and white
pinwheel mints. Our parents, aunts and uncles—
everyone with whom my sister and I rung
in our childhood New Years—are gone.
You can still find beanpots, but now
they say “Boston Baked Beans” on the side
or come in festive colors, not like
the brown and tan one I was used to.
There’s a replica of the cat clock—
Kit Kat Klock—on Amazon, though I was hoping
to find the real thing. I did track down
a “Hen on a Nest” on a website
called Aunt Gladys’s Attic but there was
just a picture and a notice “out of stock.”

First published in ONLY POEMS (January, 2024)