In this family, they don’t whisper gossip: they declare it gospel. Word was she cleared her mother’s bank account as the old woman perished in hospice. When the house burned to the ground, it was easy to believe that she had hired someone to set the fire for insurance money. No one in the family doubted the story. She’d be just the type to know an arsonist. They still talk about it though. Like her mother, she also succumbed to cancer. Is it wrong to speak ill of the dead if what’s said is true?

stepsisters
cleaning the ashes
of the family tree

Scott Wiggerman

A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, Albuquerque poet Scott Wiggerman is the author of three books of poetry, Leaf and Beak: Sonnets (Purple Flag), Presence (Pecan Grove Press), and Vegetables and Other Relationships (Plain View Press); and the editor of several volumes, including Wingbeats I and II: Exercises & Practice in Poetry (Dos Gatos Press). In recent years, his love of poetic form has moved largely into Japanese forms, and haiku and art have become more central to his work as an artist of both the page and canvas.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ The Story of Fire, haibun by Scott Wiggerman in Issue 16 of MacQueen’s Quinterly (January 2023)