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Legerdemain
The magician wore
my mother’s perfume
and conjured family
from thin air—
a brother renamed uncle,
a wife recast as mother,
a daughter vanishing
behind a tale of bees.
Each sleight of hand was tender—
a hush, a smile, a bowl of soup
cooling on the Formica
while the truth was sawed in half
and tucked beneath the linoleum.
No one told me why
my “uncle” broke my father’s ribs,
or that dad’s flu came in a bottle.
No one told me my brother
had been in prison.
No one told me
I was adopted—
until Aunt Mary dropped the card
like an afterthought,
the queen of spades
sliding from her sleeve.
They said Virginia
died of a bee sting—
a prettier tale than
what swelled inside her,
the blood pressure and seizures,
the silence that followed
her body home.
And no one told me
that my mother wasn’t my mother
until dad blurted it out
on his deathbed.
I didn’t know the word for it
when I was little:
legerdemain—
sleight of hand,
sleight of memory,
the practiced art
of not quite lying
while saying nothing true.
Copyright ©
Roxanne Andorfer
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