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Mail Call
Jeff Bernstein

What a quaint concept. Line up
after rest period under the flagpole
in the high meadow overlooking
the blue northern lake where we swam,
sailed and fished. Wait for your name to be called.

You hated riflery with that counselor—
a card-carrying John Birch Society
member—missed the target intentionally,
despised the feel of gun in your hand,
hard recoil against your shoulder.

Once or twice, brown paper packages
tied with twine came from both of
your grandmothers during the long month
you were marooned in Maine
while parents toured the Continent.

You tore those parcels open to reveal tins of brownies.
To share. Baltimore version intensely chocolatey
but way past prime. Worcester iteration
fresher, wrapped in enough layers
of aluminum foil to sink a battleship.

Clumps of two or three Boston Globes arrived
now and then like dividing daisies, month’s
subscription from parents to assuage their guilt
at sending you where you didn’t want to be, fevered
coverage of the Sox a watery tonic.

When they returned from abroad,
a newsy letter in blue or purple ink,
mother’s distinctive hand, appeared
regularly and reported on neighborhood
doings, younger sibs, your dog.

Less often, black-lettered onionskin
envelopes that father typed himself,
closing with Love or Fondly and three handwritten
characters—Dad. If only you’d saved them all.
You still tear up when you find one.

—
A lifelong New Englander, Jeff Bernstein watches the seasons slowly turn from a hillside in Central Vermont. Poetry is his favorite and earliest art form (he can’t draw a whit or hold a tune). He would most have liked to have been, like Thoreau, “an inspector of snow-storms and rain-storms… [a] surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes.” He is the author of two chapbooks and a full-length collection: Nightfall, Full of Light, published by Turning Point. He was Runner-Up in the 2023 Concrete Wolf Louis Poetry Book Award and received an honorable mention in the 2023 Homebound Publication Poetry Prize competition. His new collection, The Ancient Ways, will be published in 2024.

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