Wordplay with Kendall Kieras ’24
By Birdie Keller ’24
We are so excited to introduce another edition of Wordplay, where we feature incredible creative writing from our very own senior English majors! This month, Kendall Kieras was generous enough to share a poem.
Kendall is a senior English Literature and Political Science double major from Seattle. They are the president of Mac’s spoken word club, MacSlams, and were a member of Mac’s 2023 Midwest Poetry Mashup winning slam team.
ode to my grandmother
if she was a patron saint she would be patron saint of perfect hostas.
or sugar free pudding.
or saturday morning gossip.
sometimes, she meets strangers at the hy-vee
and tells them i’m going to be a famous writer
which is hard, because almost everyone in a Minnesota HyVee is her distant relative or ex-coworker.
sometimes, i am sure she was the first woman
pomegranate squishing down her open palm in the garden of eden
my grandmother, who was a midwife, who easily could have birthed us all
my grandmother, whose daughter, my mother
died five days before christmas
and still her tree was the most beautiful every year
my grandma tells me she got kicked out at thirteen
after, she lived with a different family every year of high school
she’d go on dates just for the free meal
she tells me good thing she was pretty, or she wouldn’t have eaten
i imagine her out there, prom queen hands pressed in the iowa dirt
a month ago, she told me her dad died when she was 16.
when I asked why she didn’t tell me before, she said she forgot to mention it.
when my dad didn’t call on my birthday she made me a chocolate cake
box duncan hines frosting from a can
my name in red sprinkles to cover a forty five degree tilt
she laughed, “it’s ugly, but it tastes good.”
sometimes, she talks to the sky at night
asks my mother to make things easy for me.
my grandmother, who raised me for a year after her daughter, my mother died
64 with a baby, immaculate conception
sometimes, I imagine putting the death tape on reverse.
sitting with her at the tv, watching my mother bloom over and over.
my grandmother says she stopped going to church when my mom died.
because all she’d do is sit in the pews and cry.
my grandmother has seen so much pain.
and still loves stronger than anyone.
she sang me lullabies for ten years,
and every week she brings cookies to my great uncle in memory care
she complains about my punk clothes but patches them anyway.
she bandaged my knees and dried my tears.
she is the most ordinary miracle i have ever seen.
sometimes i wish i could replace her arthritic fingers with my own
so when she gets to heaven she can hold my mother the way she used to.
for her, i hope to grow old, so when i get there
she knows what my mother would have looked like.
a soft hand reaching out to touch her daughter’s face again.