NEA Big Read at PWPL

A Mantle of Antlers by: Ann Richmond Garrett When you watch your husband shoot a red squirrel off the roof, remember? How you once believed you were made only to watch city lights come up like a tide each night? And in the morning rise to follow the scent of bread, in thin October air? There’s comfort in how that place will go on without you, a continuum untended. Unlike the shingles here that need mending, or garden box you couldn’t bring yourself to weed, where–as summer moved– the beardtongue drowned in switchgrass. There’s a way your grandmother knew this too: as a girl, sent with cash on Michigan Ave for takeout and cigarettes. Her steps rang new, electric. In afternoons she stole away to films with her Oma. They whispered in German, at ease in multitudes. She left Chicago for a garden in the north to tend while her husband worked, children running feral in the scrub. Some nights, letting white sheets go chilled on the line she walked the orchard’s edge, envisioning her city’s vis...