Mom Tunes Up a Guitar in the Lake Superior Rental Cabin
From the other room, gentle twangs
slide up and down, sounding
like she might break
into a quiet classical tune—
bent over a neck both strange
and familiar, muscles patterning
across the quarter century
since, struggling to contain
three sudden-sprinting boys
and one wound-up spaniel,
she lost a middle fingertip
to that summer day and a since-
recalled leash. I still remember
sitting with her beneath the sloped
ceiling in the bunkroom, dormer-lit,
as she pulled from nylon strings
the whispers of another world
she seldom shared, even then.
No, she says now, settling it back
into its stand, the lake
lapping at the rocks, birches
clicking their leaves, the screen
door breeze: no, just tuning it
for the next person who comes along.
John Linstrom is the author of To Leave for Our Own Country (Black Lawrence Press, 2024) and editor of The Liberty Hyde Bailey Library (Cornell University Press). His poems have recently appeared in Northwest Review, North American Review, The Christian Century, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and daughter in Shreveport, Louisiana, where he is an assistant professor of English and holds the Mattie Allen Broyles Inaugural Year Research Chair at Centenary College of Louisiana.
Header photo by Africa Studio, courtesy Shutterstock. Photo of John Linstrom by Kate McKenna.
