My piano is an old Wurlitzer my grandfather<\/p>\n
won in a poker game and<\/p>\n
nearly sent my grandmother over the edge<\/p>\n
when he brought it home at 3am.<\/p>\n
It sits in my living room getting even older.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The keys are losing their action and<\/p>\n
their ivory — authentic, not the white plastic they<\/p>\n
use nowadays — has yellowed in places,<\/p>\n
chipped in others but<\/p>\n
I keep it all anyway, the way I keep other<\/p>\n
memories that aren’t mine yet<\/p>\n
claim me.\u00a0 I am the Grand<\/p>\n
Curator of stories not my own.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I sift through the photos from<\/p>\n
my mother, tucked into cardboard<\/p>\n
albums softened over decades.<\/p>\n
Strangers smile back at me. My mother, slim and twenty,<\/p>\n
among them.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I have sheet music from my father and<\/p>\n
I play their tunes and hear his voice but<\/p>\n
it’s the made-up voice of 30s dance halls and 40s big bands<\/p>\n
and 50s musicals where the boy gets the girl in the end.<\/p>\n
He used too much pedal when he played them and it used to<\/p>\n
make me laugh the way the notes would<\/p>\n
wash into each other<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
the way these thoughts wash into each other.<\/p>\n
One superseding another. One eddying into another’s surge<\/p>\n
eroding both. Leaving me with this<\/p>\n
keyboard and these wraiths that aren’t mine but<\/p>\n
are what I have.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My piano is an old Wurlitzer my grandfather won in a poker game and nearly sent my grandmother over the edge when he brought it home at 3am. It sits in my living room getting even older. The keys are losing their action and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4534,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-109517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-half-marathon-poem","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4534"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=109517"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109517\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":124781,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109517\/revisions\/124781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=109517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=109517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=109517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}