what i’m telling you is true my great grandmother was an american spy straight from the warfront of world war 2 i heard stories of her beauty (do i look like her?) and her bravery (do i act like her?) but mostly how she’d sit at a table every night and serve dinner to her family my grandfather would eat but i’d imagine she’d sit there and stare across the table at the awful man she married and think about her life choices (do i think like her?) she’d do everything her job required and carry on her routine every day until she and her child escaped to america i’m sure it broke her husband’s heart but his heart sat on the plate she served before she left
What I’m telling you might not all be true. I’ve never heard the specifics, and my ten-year-old brain spun vague stories into crazy anecdotes of heroism and bravery by my great-grandmother. I imagine her walking through the streets of London in three-piece suits, helping British spies and saving the world. I imagine her sitting across from her terrible husband at dinner and thinking of all the different ways she could leave. I imagine her meeting a proper man who looked at her like she hung the moon, who proposed to her secretly and offered to save her from the life she’d only been half living. I imagine the house empty when her former husband knocks on the door, the plates packed in boxes and halfway across the ocean to a new world that was never really new. I imagine this ― tell you this ― because it may not be the truth, but because I want to be just as good as I imagine her to be.
Behind the Writing
“I wrote this piece for my poetry class as part of a workshop assignment! I was inspired by my great grandmother, who led a really interesting life that I hadn’t really taken the time to dive into.”
Margaret Derby (IG: @mags.derby)
Writer To Writer Literary Journal 