Sarah Cooper
Grandma's House
The cellar was our favorite place to play the Ouija board. Shelves lined with pickled okra, beets, beans and preserves. We would become hypnotized in the late afternoons as sun rays shot through the one window, oranges and pinks and blues of the jams glistening on shelves swooping low in the middle. We would find things in that room, old coins under the washer or boxes of dried flowers you kept for no reason we could understand. Your stairs leading down had one loose board where we would hide pebbles from the lake and bird feathers, ingredients we called them for spells. On the floor we would sit, feel the cool linoleum on our legs. I thought you had built this room for us, set it below the rest of the home to let us know we could go there and preserve our youth.
Bio
Sarah Cooper completed her MFA at Converse College under the direction of Denise Duhamel, Suzanne Cleary, Richard Tillinghast and Rick Mulkey. Currently, Sarah is a Lecturer at Clemson University in the Department of English and Assistant Poetry Editor for the South85 Review.