By Amelia Barr
God says “turn the other cheek”
Those who’ll inherit the earth are meek
But I am angry, let havoc wreak
I cannot fight it, I am weak
“His yoke is easy, his burden is light”
Yet every day is my darkest plight
I have not the strength to do what is right
I am not your soldier, I am not fit to fight.
Until It's Done - Jacob Davick - Yes
I won’t know what I'm doing
Until it's done.
I’ll lay on my deathbed and float above.
Having to be content
with the life I chose to live.
I’ll sit down next to God.
The first this I’ll ask is
What was I supposed to do?
By Ella Green
Oh horse, beautiful horse,
I am sorry to see you go.
I did not hear the gunshot
That was the end of you,
But I observed your sad suffering for a long, long time.
Each day I watched you,
Scouring the land for whatever you could consume,
But it was not nearly enough.
It seemed that every day
It became harder and harder for you to live,
And I could see the monster of malnourishment
Slowly taking you captive.
I could see your ribs through your skin,
Your brittle bones showing through,
And how hard it was to even move across the field you were in.
I wonder,
Did you ever gallop or run free,
Wild horse,
Or were you always confined inside
A fence you could not break out of?
I hope you did at some point in your life
Run free
And taste the sweetness and beauty that the world has to offer.
But today,
You no longer had the strength or desire
To go on living,
So you laid your body down,
You laid for such a long time
In the mud,
Not even able to stand yourself up
To retrieve the apples thrown to you.
You noble stallion,
I am glad that you are no longer in pain,
Living in agony and misery,
But it hurts my heart
To see the plastic tarp
Draped over your body,
Lying on the earth,
Surrendered to the mud and dirt.
The heavens cried their tears
And cleansed your black body one last time
Before you died,
Even the birds were unsettled and darted around restlessly,
And I could hear another creature, I don’t know what,
Suffering in the trees,
But not in silence,
It was screaming.
And dear horse,
Your closest companion, the cow,
Lifted his voice
And gave a mournful moan
At your leaving life,
Him now being alone.
. . .
The sorrowful sight of suffering
Or the sour sting of death—
What hurts worse?
Now all I see when I look beyond the trees
Is the tarp covering your bold, black body.
Goodbye,
Beautiful horse.
By Evelyn Reed
I’ll pay homage to my thoughts.
But will the simple words of language alone truly make a picture of the messy string connected together?
I don’t think they will.
My thoughts are filled with emotions I can’t seem to tell.
A constant state of well… whatever it is.
I can’t ever seem to place it with the concrete words that language has given me.
They’re told in words, images, emotions.
Yet to describe and show you all those things still doesn’t mean you see the same thing.
A simple word can create a different image in your eyes.
Nature is an example.
My mind creates a picture of a sunny fall trail.
A tall tree falls over it and blocks the orange rays of sunlight but just for a moment.
I’m sure even as I described what I saw to you, you saw something different.
My thoughts are different from yours, that’s obvious.
So how can I pay a proper homage to something I can’t even make sure you’ll understand in the words I’ll understand.
I suppose that’s something I overthink.
I won’t be able to make you see the exact same thing unless I paint it,
yet I stand here with no painting simply because I can’t trust my hands more than my words.
I trust the words that don’t seem to do my swirling justice.
At least much more than I trust how well I can show you the shadows that cascade through the leaves of the tree on a fall trail.
Maybe my thoughts are too contradictory.
But they’re mine so I suppose even if you don’t understand, I will.
By Margo Windemuller
If roses are red
And violets are blue
Why in the world
Does that mean
I love you?
You stare at the sky
You think you can fly
But you keep falling down
With each useless try
Oh how I think of you still
Though your affection is willed
All my words are still nil
As if I choked on a pill
In your garden
The one we sparred in
where roses are a bloody crimson
And the violets are all picked on
And if folds are for the blind
And you still can’t be mine
Shall I still wish you
A happy Valentine?
By Justin Martin
Autumn leaves drift down
Sunlight peers through ancient gate
A man walks alone
Dragons fill the sky
Wind caresses bamboo leaves
Am I dreaming now?
Evening light dances
Seductively with longing
On Lake Zizhuyuan
The man sits under
Crimson tiled pavilion
Feeling weight of time
Women play guzheng
Ancient melodies on strings
Fill my heart with bliss
Nirvana achieved?
Alas blissful beauty fades
Time is running out
Light fades to evening
I depart unwilling
Sighing and aching
Will I return to
Lake Zizhuyuan one last time?
Only in heaven
By Isabel Mullins
How to live a life
Under the roof of a cover
Though the words have no ceiling.
How to live in a world
Confined to a line of symbols
Beneath your eyes and
Remember that each symbol
Holds an infinity.
i
Realize that these words
Will never die.
Whatever a soul may think or feel
Will not make them
Any less real.
ii
These books are sieves.
Hold them gently-- perhaps
You are not the one that lives.
Allow your mind
To drip like rainwater until
A sliver of sunlight breaks
Your cage.
iii
Find a power that
Verges on understanding and
Take it in your hands.
Hold softly the inner-workings of meaning
Let them sing to you the
Wild, moon-bound howls
Of freedom.
Let them guide you across the
Barren, wind-washed plain.
Let them turn your mind
To raindrops.
Let them lead you home.
Yet. - Margo Windemuller - Yes
I hate it when people
Talk so much
That they don't have time to think
Like an endless spring of saltwater
I hate it when people
Pretend they don’t care
Like paying for your actions
Is all just a game
I hate it when people
Act like they know something you don’t
You don’t know something
You don’t know anything
I hate when people
Walk like they’re close to me
Stop trying to hustle your way
To every inside joke
I hate it when people
Give their every opinion
Their pet peeves
It’s annoying.
By Almeda Pitts
my voice drops a bit because it’s an act
a facade
or maybe a facet
an angle of the truth, which is a 3-D object just like anything else
i turn it, making sure you see only the angle i want you to,
and it’s not a bad thing, and it’s not a lie,
but it’s not a good thing and not totally alright
i’m a jellyfish still, still undefined, shifting and changing with time
By Almeda Pitts
Sometimes you write, even though your words are shriveled and flaky
Fermented, perhaps, while they rot on rich black earth
Maybe your words are pickled, souring as they float on the wet surface of your brain
Your skull, thin like an eggshell, holds your rich yellow yolk of failure, because that’s all an egg for eating really is:
a failure to make something
Some like it when I regurgitate this yolk of words and cook it, make it something they can consume.
I like it too, the slow process of turning the egg over in my sizzling mind or on a hot piece of paper; watching the translucent, slimy gunk become cloudy, then opaque-white: soft and salted and edible.
If I leave the middle a bit icky, you can eat it and taste my thoughts.
By Cooper Dutton
Death is a door
A door?
Yes a door
I guarantee you and others
Have all seen it before
It lines the dull royal blue
With sweet shiny silver
It sits on the bank
Of a long bending river
But what is the door?
Is it closed to my pride?
Is it just free escape?
Is there nothing inside?
Death is a door
But what does that mean?
Is it a gray and a black?
Or a gold and a green?
Both says a man
On the tip of a spire
For what is a green
But a blue with new fire
And what is silver
But a gray we desire
Death is a door
Found every day
But if you try hard to find it
You throw the river away
The green mossy water
Starts spinning and draining
Left to there to dry
Until others start raining
Death is a door
A door?
Yes a door
I guarantee you and others
Have all seen it before
It lines the dull royal blue
With sweet shiny silver
It sits on the bank
Of a long bending river
By Margo Windemuller
I remember that day
When I held your tiny hand
and watched you watch the sky
Then you laughed in innocent delight,
your eyes filled with the sight
Of the clouds changing from flowers to cars
Each lock of your hair
The light shone bare
I remember the way your tiny head fell on my shoulder
The way my mind instantly folded
And your little nose, tipped in blush from frost
At what end will this be, at what cost?
The rough gray concrete bench
The hot chocolate stench
Your scarf was coming loose
The bright yarn you would choose
Once you woke, we sat there for a while
Watching you watch the pigeons; a smile
That smile, that beautiful feature
The sight itself makes me weaker
You wanted a balloon from the balloon vender
We got three, yellow, blue, something redder
You skipped along the sidewalk
Along all the balloons bobbed
You were pretending the curb was much taller
An explorer is what she told me to call her
How I wish you could’ve seen it ensue
If you turned to watch me watch you
How you would have felt it dance
Of an old father being entranced
By Joanna Ward
Eerie and foggy, in the woods. Cicadas are screaming. Solo figure center stage, aggressively doing push ups.
HUBERT: (counting push ups) Man, I'm so manly! I just need… a sandwich! If only my wife weren’t at embroidery camp! Guess I'm going to bed hungry..
HUBERT goes to bed. Awakened by GHOST OF WOMAN PAST
GHOST OF WOMAN PAST: It’s time to wake up
HUBERT: Mom???
GHOST OF WOMAN PAST: No, I am the ghost of a woman past. Let’s go visit your childhood.
HUBERT: No, I..I can’t. I need to get Sasha from embroidery camp in the morning.
GHOST OF WOMAN PAST: Let me show you something first
Magic transportation noise
MOTHER: Wake up honey it’s time for school!
HUBERT: Mom what the flip! Leave me alone! I hate you and your feminist literature; always making me read about the suffrage movement! When I'm older I'm gonna hate all women!!
MOTHER: Now dear you don’t mean that. Come on now it’s time to get up
HUBERT: I’d never listen to a.. woman..
MOTHER: Hubert Hunter Huck! I’m taking away your protein powder for a week young man!
HUBERT and GHOST OF WOMAN PAST are seen observing the dream.
GHOST OF WOMAN PAST: Do you remember Hubert? This is how you treated your own mother.
HUBERT: And?? That old fart didn’t realize how much she really scarred me that day.
GHOST OF WOMAN PAST: I see you still do not recognize the error of your ways.
Magic transportation noise. HUBERT is back in bed snoring. When he is awakened by the GHOST OF WOMAN PRESENT.
HUBERT: Sasha?? Finally, I'm so hungry. And how did you even drive here? It better not have been another man, and I hope to God not Dave.
GHOST OF WOMAN PRESENT: I am not Sasha, I am the Ghost of Woman Present, let's go visit your wife… at embroidery camp!
Magic transportation noise
SASHA: omg yeah my husband gets on my nerves so much, you would not believe it. First off all he eats is chicken and rice with no seasoning because it's ¨extra calories¨! Who does that! He comes home from work and I have slaved away spreading hours making him a nice meal but not all he wants is his dry, unseasoned chicken and nasty undercooked rice! And on top of that all he drinks is protein shakes! His breath is horrific! And then gym days, gym days are the worst he comes home late at night and pulls up in his car that cost more than our wedding and i'm already in bed of course because its like 11 o'clock and he sits down on the couch to watch his joe rogan or whatever SO LOUD and i say “hun will you turn that down please, i'm trying to sleep” and he just says “shut up woman, when i married you i thought that would make you stop nagging me, you sound just like my mother” like dont be saying that as if you are the pick of the litter! Have you seen him? He is SO UGLY! I only ever married him because I thought he was “funny” and because my sister’s boyfriend looked like he was about to pop the question and I was not about to let my younger sister get married before I did. AND ANOTHER THING
SASHA fades out as we transport back to HUBERT and GHOST OF WOMAN PRESENT
HUBERT: I...I never knew my wife had... feelings!
GHOST OF WOMAN PRESENT: bruh
Magic transportation noise. HUBERT Wakes up in a cold sweat
HUBERT: Thank goodness it was all just a dream!
(distant voice) EVE: father!
HUBERT: What is that ruckus?
GHOST OF WOMAN FUTURE: (In a demonic voice) I am the ghost of Woman Future!
HUBERT: *High pitched scream in terror*
GHOST OF WOMAN FUTURE: That was the voice of your future daughter
HUBERT: Where's my son? Where’s my pride? Where's my future?
GHOST OF WOMAN FUTURE: You have no son! The future is female!
HUBERT: Noooooooooooooooo!
HUBERT starts doing push ups and crying
HUBERT: (counting push-ups) I must increase my testosterone! That's the only way! I must have a son!
EVE: But what would happen to me?
HUBERT: You would just…die..
Flashback to memory of vulnerability with MOTHER.
HUBERT: She broke up with me for no reason! I knew I couldn’t rely on anyone but myself! No woman will ever love me ever again!
MOTHER (calmy): I will always love you..
Magic transportation noise.. He actually wakes up.
HUBERT: I have been so blind. Women… they have minds and they have souls, as well as just hearts. Hearts more tender than my own. Oh no I almost forgot, Sasha!
HUBERT runs out of his house and gets in a car as he drives down the road he shouts to people passing by
HUBERT: Happy Women’s history month! Happy women’s history month! Happy women’s history month!
He pulls up to embroidery camp where he meets Sasha and hugs her
SASHA: Hubert what's going on
HUBERT: Honey, I'm so sorry I will never drink protein powder again and I promise to always do the dishes and I will never eat chicken and rice again!
SASHA: What has gotten into you?
HUBERT: I had the craziest dream last night! Come on get in the car and I'll tell you all about it.
The end
By Cooper Dutton
Stainless steel
That can’t be me
The pain is real
When it cuts deep
Diamond tipped
And razor sharp
Squeeze too hard
Then blood it starts
stainless steel
But covered in rust
You cut your heel
To fit you must
Shoes too tight
Shoes too thin
Too fit you might
Cut more again
Stainless steel
Laying on the floor
She cant walk
Forever more
Tried too hard
To continue stainless
All that much hurt
Yet she’s still nameless
By Cooper Dutton
i listen to the leaves of fall
and all the noise of the world both near and far are all bottled up and strummed in the chords and strings of my guitar
as i listen to the sweet rings and as my calluses start to sting the breeze picks up and carrie's leaves in the reflection of my silver rings
ironic that the warmest colors are used to describe the time when heat starts to dissolve and turn green to gray as the the real colors all fall and hit God's green turned silver hair
deer play in the yard go to stop to eat a berry or so and merry dancing all below the the pretty pumpkin trees
my toes are are cold but i don't care i sit in the breeze of october air as sun hits the ground like a the shadow of the heavens
i'm happy now no harm no care and i don't need to see the air to know it's ring and feel the sting of a cold bitter breeze
The Lights are bright and my eyes dilate i guess my being here is a twist of fate is goes round and round and down a long bending river
Here we are and nowhere else to see the smile of one with self and hope and pray i'll see the day that smile touches mine
i listen to the leaves of fall
and all the noise of the world both near and far are all bottled up and strummed in the chords and strings of my guitar
By Joanna Ward
i feel like a piece of kensugi art
i’m broken and fractured in a million pieces
but mended back together with gold
some days i feel like that gold isn’t gold at all
i feel like i’ve been mended with mud
sometimes it feels like super glue spread haphazardly in the cracks
some days i feel a piece is missing
maybe it’s just a little chip
other days i feel a huge empty hole
i wonder what artist decide to put me back together
carefully and delicately painting my impurities
instead of tossing me into the trash
By Clara Monahan
I want to be the part of me
Knotted in colorful strings and thread
The part some call hope (the stars
I took from constellations in my head
And put in my pocket
Letting them fizzle there)
I'd Live in every washy soapy dream I dreamt
Sleeping in the reflection of fresh waxed wood
Wading in creeks
Breathing underwater
Weightless.
Clear.
That’s what my name means
Clear and bright
Though sometimes I lie
And often I make my friends look smart when I speak my truest mind
But in my hopes I do not fear my voice
I can listen to it flowing
Those around me hear and join
Wading
Splashing
Clean
In my hopes my eyes are blue
So truth may perch inside them
And those who look to my face
Walk away growing daisies
Like green giants playing under wood
Mossy
Fresh
Real
But I can smell the starry bread going stale
Hardening in my pocket
It rustles around in there
Just enough to remember
But so little I forget
What was it again?
Ahh yes,
My hopes.
My feet are just so grounded now
Planted, rooted, stiff
I climb stairs but not mountains
Dreaming hopes I’ll disappoint tomorrow
Crumbling
Hardened
Gone.
By Lauren Tyler
I’ve always found it funny how people show up exactly when you don’t need them. When you’re moving houses, your neighbor’s weekends suddenly fill up with family trips, Little League baseball games, and a yearly pilgrimage to church. They don’t have a second to spare to help load furniture into the back of a U-Haul. When the boxes are packed and you’ve gone back one last time to get the miscellaneous items - the ironing board, the plants in the kitchen window - they suddenly show up in your driveway to say goodbye and offer their services, knowing full and well from spying through the cracks in their blinds that your house is empty.
I’ve suffered through such bitter hypocrisy many times. When my grandfather died, the pastor of the church he attended for seven years suddenly appeared to offer his condolences, his services, and to pray with my family. He stayed for fifteen minutes, said a heartfelt goodbye and the classic, “If there’s anything you need, let me know,” and went on his way. Paston Allan had not come to see my grandfather once in his thirteen-month decline, but he strolled into the room that had eluded him, Bible in hand, not an hour after he died. I’m typically not the kind to judge God’s appointed, but when a chief representative can’t even visit the dying until they’re dead, I question whether they’re really carrying their cross.
I was thirteen when my grandfather was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. My grandmother was the first person to recognize its calling card. When we went to their house for dinner, after we retired to the living room she would always recount her harrowing experiences of trying to get my grandfather back in the house after a walk. “He was pitching and staggering - I didn’t think I was going to be able to get him up the stairs! He just about took both of us down,” she’d say. To my thirteen-year-old self, a person who knew everything, the reason for this was obvious. He had been walking in a flannel shirt, sweatpants, and a baseball hat out in the sweltering September heat. Of course he was pitching and staggering - it was a wonder he didn’t pass out. I dismissed the images of my grandfather swaying like a drunkard, lurching and staggering as my grandmother tried to haul him up the garage stairs. There was nothing to it. My grandparents had always loved to exacerbate any illness. If they had the sniffles, then pneumonia was just around the corner.
It wasn’t long after a particularly bad pitching and staggering episode that my grandfather went to the doctor. After a slew of tests, scans, and possible diagnoses, my grandparents’ paranoia about illness finally paid off. My grandfather was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, a disease that would claim his mobility, his mind, and his life. His prognosis was a strange mix of a nightmare and a dream come true. From that day on, any trip over the carpet, stiff back, or loss for words was a result of The Disease. My grandfather’s fondness for complaining about his ailments had finally found its playground. There was no shortage of symptoms he could run to, no lack of signs of an untimely death he couldn’t swing from. To him, it was real. To me, it was just another delusion.
As time went on, it became evident that not everything was in his head. My grandfather’s gait slowly shortened until he was shuffling instead of walking. His legs started to quiver like the ground during an earthquake. My grandparents no longer went to church. I finally realized that something truly wasn’t right when he could no longer play cards. From the time I was in elementary school, my grandparents picked me up from school every Friday to go out to eat and play cards at their house afterward until my parents dragged me home. Playing cards is an ancient tradition in the Tyler family. My grandfather grew up around card games. His parents, aunts, and uncles would stay up all night drinking and placing bets they never meant to pay while my grandfather and his siblings were “asleep.” Whether his elders knew it or not, he watched them through the crack of his bedroom door, learning the secret art of five card draw. Needless to say, our games were more tame. We played penny-ante, only betting with coins that my grandfather saved in a crystal jar by his bed to give to me when I came over. I finally came to terms with his illness when one day he pushed himself up from the table, arms shaking like branches in a storm wind, and went to take a nap in his recliner after only seven hands of five card draw.
As the weeks passed, it became clear that my grandfather was in a downward spiral. His imaginary ailments started to materialize and my grandmother took up the burden of being his caretaker. She draws meaning from serving everyone else’s needs before her own, bending over backward to indulge every whim. She was able to lift him out of his recliner and walk him to the bathroom for a while, but even she couldn’t care for him completely. That was when talk of her moving in with my family started. It began with the occasional search on Zillow for a four-person house, but the discussion quickly escalated to showings and the dreaded day that the “For Sale” sign went up in my yard. I could feel life slipping out of my control. I’ve never liked change, and I was losing everything in a landslide.
To make a long lament short, we sold our house and moved from a rural, eleven-home subdivision to a suburban neighborhood complete with a HOA and a pool. Those days took my mind off of my grandfather, but I lost some of the short time I had left with him. My visits started to become few and far between as I struggled to adjust to life away from my childhood home. Occasionally, guilt would sneak up on me, and I would visit him on Sunday after church, but those visits always carried a reminder: Things would never be the same. Until the day he died, there would be an invisible curtain between my grandfather and me. I lived on the Outside, the world that he had once inhabited and enjoyed before The Disease. He lived on the Inside in a one-room apartment at Rosewood Assisted Living where he lived out his remaining days waiting for the worst to happen. I ran away every time I remembered the grim reality of change.
My grandfather died thirteen months after he left the Outside. Guilt got the best of me in the end. I went to see him every day during the week prior to his death. I would leave school early to go sit with him and I spent my weekends in a room that reeked of death. I would stare at his vacant eyes, the windows to the words he could no longer say, as he gripped my hand like a lifeline, like it was the only thing that kept him tethered to this world. In that brief time before he left, I found both pain and relief. I hated that he had to go so soon, but I enjoyed a time with him that I’d never had before. My grandfather was a hard-headed man who would listen to you on occasion but preferred to talk over you. When he lost his voice, I found I could tell him everything. I talked about our family, school, and how I wished him the best. If he’d been able to respond, I would have kept my mouth shut, too afraid of what I’d hear in reply. I said goodbye with the squeeze of a hand and one-sided conversations, a rare privilege that most don’t enjoy. I was able to be myself in front of him for the first time without the threat of being shut down.
I began to remember my grandfather more kindly after those last days with him. The memories of his cutting rebukes and quick temper started to fade, replaced with memories of a mellow old man who had all the time in the world to listen to me. I started to become caught up in this image of a perfect relationship that never existed. It wasn’t until my grandfather’s funeral that I realized I’d been deluding myself. I volunteered to write his eulogy so I could make sure that the audience truly knew the man that is Charles Tyler. After all, I knew him best. I was the one who could make him smile and turn his head in his last days when everyone else received blank stares. As I sat clicking away at my computer, I started to talk about my grandfather’s flaws - his temper, his stubbornness - and a warning light went off in the back of my head. What if I wasn’t doing him justice? Shouldn’t I present his best so that people remember him kindly? I turned a blind eye to the warning and left them in.
When I gave the eulogy to my parents and grandmother to read, the warning light went off in their minds too. They didn’t ignore it. My mom was the messenger of their consensus: I should take out the sentence about his vices. When I asked why, she reminded me of the obvious thing I had missed all along. My grandfather had a darkness that he hid from the world. Few people knew his cruelty, but those who did knew it well. He had an arsenal of idiomatic sayings that could make a person smile on the bleakest of days, but he could also tear a man to shreds with nothing but words. He was generous to charities, but he never gave his own son a dime. My grandfather built a perfect persona for the world to see, but inside the walls of his own home, the ugliness curated from a childhood with an alcoholic father and a hard life of poverty escaped. I love my grandfather no doubt. But do I love the real Charles Tyler?
During the funeral, as I stood at my post by his urn, I thought about how no one in the room knew who he really was. The people who shed tears, the woman who talked about how he always hugged her at church, had never seen the monster within. I gave my speech about what a good man he was; I don’t know how much of it I believed. Yet as I gave it, I understood something about my grandfather that no one else does. A mirror has two sides: the reflection and the person looking in. The mirror can be sparkling clean and show the perfect image of a person, or it can be dirty and blackened with age, showing a distortion of the person looking in. Yet the reflection is not the true person. It is only an interpretation created by light and reflective glass. My grandfather was neither the perfect person the world saw nor the twisted man my father and grandmother lived with. He was a human being. He was complicated; he was fractured by a hard life; he was sewn back together by his family’s love. Charles Tyler was neither a saint nor a devil. He was Grandaddy. He was the man who saved coins in a jar to give to his granddaughter because a child has no greater delight than counting their quarters. He was the man who had a scathing voice when he told me to turn down the volume on the T.V., but he was also the one who introduced me to the world of music with “American Pie.” He was the man who croaked out, “That’s my girl,” when I told him I was in the running for valedictorian the day before he passed.
Most people learn their alphabet or about the fantastic world of the 1950s from their grandparents. They learn valuable life lessons like holding on to the hem of your shirtsleeve when you put on a jacket so your sleeves don’t bunch up. From my grandfather, I learned that people are rarely what they seem. Everyone has their vices and virtues, but people seldom see that these are building blocks of the whole. My grandfather was not the sum of solely his violent temper nor of his generosity. He was a complex whole of the many experiences and qualities that made him Charles Tyler, a man who could give you advice for any situation because he’d lived it. I follow the final lesson he taught me everywhere I go. I think about the parts of people I see, their public image, and the parts I don’t see, the explosion when inner turmoil boils over. Most importantly, I realize that they are human. No man is perfect, but he may very well be the boy who stayed up late watching poker games and the grandfather who thinks about his granddaughter as he draws his last breath.
