Katherine Gaffney

On Watching Marie Antoinette After My Love’s Grandfather Died

With the care of our neighbor picking peas freshly ripe
in June for us, you flipped through the cable menu
and settle on her, pink-cheeked Kirsten Dunst in a gown
practically sewn from whipped cream. No cake
or champagne, not even from the goblets you love to cite
as modeled after her breasts. Instead, you munched
on Cheetos Puffs, powdered your fingers orange as she powders
her cheeks pink. Is it her impending death that drew
you to her, the violence of it, contrasted with the slow spread
of your grandfather’s? A death that crept up before
you could fly down. The shots of her candy-color shoes
foreshadowed the golf shoes you would find after
the funeral while everyone else pocketed glass paperweights
and Mont Blanc pens. Nested in the trunk
of your grandfather’s TownCar beside the golf bag, they waited
for this storm of ossiferous cancer to pass.
Your grandmother insists you see if your grandfather’s crocodile
shoes fit that she'll mail you them, once she finds them
in this mess. The question I know you will not ask is, But where
would I wear them? A question that never left Marie’s tongue
as she was fitted for the bodice of each new gown. For now,
you bring home three baseball caps, as ornamental
for you as Marie Antoinette and her silk chapeaux—for her,
these are disposable, for you, irreplaceable. You tell me
you never really knew him, except for the golf balls that rolled
around his bedroom and the orchid he transplanted
onto the tree in their yard on Date Palm Road. Had Marie
Antoinette ever tasted a date? In all the lush platters
carried across screen, we spot none. Another Florida summer,
you call to say we should make fans fashionable again
to cool ourselves in style, a coquettish comment incongruent
to your context, just as the alcohol pouring into your aunt's
glass is of a different note than the champagne pouring
into the glasses of Marie Antoinette's doll-like entourage.
The morning after the service you call to tell me about driving
the golf cart to sprinkle your grandfather's ashes
over the sand trap he hit most often during his 18-holes,
how the ashes mounted to less than you imagined
for a burned body. I tell you that what is buried near Marie
Antoinette's priant may not even be entirely her body.

Katherine Gaffney (she/her/hers) completed her MFA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is currently working on her PhD at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in jubilat, Harpur Palate, Mississippi Review, Meridian, and elsewhere. Her first chapbook, Once Read as Ruin, was published by Finishing Line Press. She has received scholarships from the University of Illinois, the University of Southern Mississippi, the Beatrix Potter Society, and the Sewanee Writers Conference in support of her writing endeavors.