A Last First Sunday

A Last First Sunday

Olga Dugan

 (for Anna P. Erwin)

Mom and my aunt had long picked first
Sundays for the family to eat together
pray together and so stay together
but we were growing up and apart, and

I had a paper to turn in no later than
Wednesday for a group project with new
colleagues who would just as well carry
on without me if I failed them
I feared

almost as much as she feared blindness
my aunt, a diabetic, who had finally
agreed to do laser eye surgery scared

she sat at the dining room table
with cutting board and ingredients for her
famous mac and cheese and I normally
would have stayed to chat but trepidation
over tradition called and I kindly excused
myself to acquiesce

coming home from work three nights later
I had just barely opened the door before
my sister met me with the news our aunt
died at home and we could see her
if we hurried

the door chilled against my forehead

the last I saw of her was her back
before this door shut out a world
of first Sundays with her…those days
I no longer call mere tradition…
and it was Wednesday

that morning only my paper was on time
others would get theirs in later for
whatever reasons, excuses
I no longer remember

---

Olga Dugan
Cave Canem Poet & Professor

Olga has been recently published in Relief Journal, Channel (Ireland), Sky Island Journal, Cathexis Northwest Press, The Write Launch, Grand Little Things, E-Verse Radio, Ariel Chart, The Windhover, and The Sunlight Press. Articles on poetry, drama, and cultural memory appear in The Journal of African American History, The North Star, and in Emory University's “Meet the Fellows.”

Photography by Jonas Jaeken